The climate record holds some of its best warnings in stone, soil, and leaves. In a new study, scientists from the University of Utah and the Colorado School of Mines looked back to one of Earth’s ...

The Paleocene is a geological epoch within the Paleogene Period, spanning approximately 66 to 56 million years ago, immediately following the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary. It is defined ...

This important study fills a major geographic and temporal gap in understanding Paleocene mammal evolution in Asia and proposes an intriguing "brawn before bite" hypothesis grounded in diverse ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. In the humid swamps of what is now Colombia, there was once ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. David Bressan is a geologist who covers curiosities about Earth. Dinosaurs had such an immense impact on Earth that their sudden ...

When people think of prehistoric life, they tend to jump to two behemoth bookends — the towering dinosaurs of the Mesozoic era and then the woolly mammoths of the ice age. But what about the millions ...

Remarkable new fossil discoveries in New Zealand are driving a significant reassessment of our understanding of the early evolution of penguins. We know Antarctica was home to at least 10 species, ...

Paleontologists uncovered another rare fossil in Texas. This time, it's a 60-million-year-old fossil of a giant possum-like mammal that is reported to be the largest marsupial found in the North ...

The Paleocene period, which followed the extinction of the dinosaurs, left behind many fossil traces across North America. Among these remnants, a remarkable discovery has emerged from what is now Big ...

Organic-cemented benthic agglutinated foraminifera are a highly dominant component of flysch-type DWAF assemblages, while agglutinated foraminifera that use calcareous cement are rare or almost absent ...

Studying ancient mammals helps scientists understand how life evolved and adapted over millions of years. Fossil discoveries provide valuable insights into extinct species, revealing their behaviors, ...

For more than 140 years, Mixodectes pungens, a species of small mammal that inhabited western North America in the early Paleocene, was a mystery. What little was known about them had been mostly ...