Ichthyosaurs represent a diverse clade of Mesozoic marine reptiles that rapidly adapted to fully aquatic lifestyles following the end-Permian mass extinction. Their streamlined, 'fish-like' body plan, ...

An extinct reptile’s oddly shaped chompers, fingers, and ear bones may tell us quite a bit about the resilience of life on Earth, according to a new study. In fact, paleontologists at Yale, Sam ...

There’s nothing like a big mass extinction to open up ecological niches and clear out the competition, accelerating evolution for some lucky survivors. Or is there? A new study suggests that the rate ...

Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of ...

Fossilized footprints discovered in southeastern Australia, dating back approximately 355 million years, have forced scientists to rethink the timeline of reptile evolution. Detailed in a recent study ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptilelike animal, dated to around 350 million years ago. The discovery suggests that after the first ...

The evolution of feathers in ancient animals was restricted to dinosaurs and their modern bird descendants. However, a reptile of the Middle Triassic period evolved something similar to feathers, ...

(CNN) — Scientists have discovered a 246 million-year-old marine reptile fossil, the oldest of its kind to be found in the Southern Hemisphere, shining a new light on the early evolution of marine ...

The newly described Mirasaura grauvogeli from the Middle Triassic had a striking feather-like crest, hinting that complex skin appendages arose far earlier than previously believed. Its bird-like ...

There are an estimated 50 billion birds flying, walking and even swimming on planet Earth according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That number is divided ...