We rely on smell more than most people may realize. Across mammals, scent guides feeding, warns of danger, and shapes social behavior. A new international study shows that this vital sense leaves a ...

An artist's impression of the shrew-like Krusatodon kirtlingtonensis, which a new study suggests lived long and matured slowly, in contrast to modern small mammals. Maija Karala Roughly 166 million ...

Long after an animal’s soft tissues have vanished, its skull still carries a blueprint of how it sensed the world. For extinct mammals, those bony clues now show that noses were not just prominent ...

Mammal species diversified more rapidly early in their history – peaking roughly 66 million years ago – before a long-term decline in diversification punctuated by diminishing bursts of evolutionary ...

Modern mammals are known for their big brains. But new analyses of mammal skulls from creatures that lived shortly after the dinosaur mass extinction show that those brains weren’t always a foregone ...

Sensitive hearing may have evolved in mammal ancestors far earlier than scientists once believed. By modeling how sound moved through the skull of Thrinaxodon, a 250-million-year-old mammal ...

In 2006 a team of paleontologists in Utah were examining the fossils of a large dinosaur when they discovered beneath its foot a tiny skull unlike anything they had seen in the area. Now, scientists ...