Alan Feduccia— Before the astounding recent discoveries of avian and dinosaurian fossils from the Mesozoic of China, the only substantial evidence for the earliest evolution of birds from their reptilian beginnings came from fossil specimens from the approximately 150-million-year-old deposits from the Late Jurassic of Bavaria, specimens known to the
Thomas S. Kidd— When did the first people come to live in North America? Or, humanly speaking, when did American history begin? These questions deal with really old history, but the answers are changing all the time. Just last month, archaeologists working at the Aucilla River in Florida announced the discovery
When you see dug-up primate bones at a natural history museum or in the science classroom, it can be difficult to fully grasp the notion that they belonged to beings that lived and breathed millennia ago. Even more difficult is to visualize what now extinct or evolved animals actually looked
The Hunsrück Slate (in German: Hunsrück-Schiefer) is one of the most valuable fossil records for paleontologists to examine. The slate was first excavated by paleontologists in 1997, and the investigation has not been completed yet. More than just visual echoes of a distant era, the fossils serve as valuable research material