In 2016, our colleague Xing Lida held up a small piece of polished, deeply yellow amber. As sunlight shone through the ancient resin, Lida saw the outline of a pristinely preserved, amazingly small ...

Piecing together the crushed skull of a fossil bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs helped researchers extrapolate what its brain would have looked like: big olfactory bulbs would have meant that ...

(CN) — Birds didn’t just inherit their dinosaur lineage — they rewired it. That's according to researchers in a study that say as their brains grew, birds' skulls became more flexible, unlocking new ...

For more than a century, scientists have been unsuccessfully hunting for skull fossils for the thunder bird species Genyornis newtoni. About 50,000 years ago, these titans, also known as mihirungs, ...

From emus to woodpeckers, modern birds show remarkable diversity in skull shape and size, often hypothesized to be the result of a sudden hastening of evolution following the mass extinction that ...

An artist’s interpretation of Vegavis iaai diving for fish in the shallow ocean off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, with ammonites and plesiosaurs for company. A new study in Nature describing a ...

LOS ANGELES – A curious teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossilized skull of the biggest bird ever found – a swift, flightless predator 10 feet tall that pursued its prey across the steppes of ...

Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at CNET. She covered climate change, space rockets, mathematical puzzles, dinosaur bones, black holes, supernovas, and sometimes, the drama of philosophical ...

The tiny fossil dates to more than 66 million years ago. "This is one of the best-preserved fossil bird skulls of any age." The fossil provides the best evidence yet of when and how the earliest ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...