This is really fun! You can now see which fossils have been found in a particular region.
Canadian microfossils might be 3.77 billion years old
Scientists keep pushing back the age of the earliest known fossils, which also suggests earlier and earlier dates for the first appearance of life on Earth. A new paper in Nature reports on microfossils from Canada alleged to be almost 3.8 billion years old. (Here is an accessible discussion in The Washington Post.)
Evolving Flight: Messier Than You Might Think...
Getting from a little theropod-thing to a fully-powered flying bird-thing is often presented as a pretty direct trajectory, as "as a long evolutionary march in which natural selection progressively refined one subgroup of dinosaurs into ever-better aerialists". In a new paper in science, Stephen Brusatte argues that recent fossil finds suggest that things were way crazier than that...
Evidence for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis fails to turn up
Did an extra-terrestrial impact cause the cooling event known as the Younger Dryas, 12,900 years ago? According to this recent paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science (also discussed here), that hypothesis predicts the occurrence of tiny nano-diamonds. But those have failed to turn up.
New research on mass extinction periodicity
Paleontologists are now taking a closer look at Lisa Randall's suggestion that the periodicity of mass extinctions can be explained by the solar system's bobbing up and down through the galactic plane, where a disc of dark matter dislodges objects from the Oort cloud. Here is an earlier discussion of Randall's idea.
Evidence that some ancient marine reptiles gave live birth.
The Lost World of Appalachia
Here is a fun piece of prehistory writing by Asher Elbein. In North America, much attention has focused on the Cretaceous ecosystems of Larimidia. But what about the territory east of the seaway that divided what is now North America? What about the prehistory of Appalachia?
"Wrinkly bags": early deuterostomes from Cambrian rocks in China
A paper just out in Nature argues that fossils from the Cambrian represent early deuterostomes, The tiny organisms have mouths, and they seem to have pores on their sides--possible precursors of gill slits?--for excreting waste. Here is one popular report on the find.
A Canadian Lagerstaette that's not the Burgess Shale
Scientists writing in the latest issue of Geology report on a newly identified Lagerstaette in Alberta, Canada, not far from Banff. The Ya Ha Tinda site records a marine ecosystem from the early Jurassic, around 183 million years ago. Here is a short description of the findings. But check out the original paper (the first link above) for nice images of the fossils.
Giant prehistoric otter from southern China
New funding for Canada's Royal Tyrrell Museum
The Canadian government and the government of Alberta are providing new funds for the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.
Cambrian hyoliths
Early tetrapod fossil from Scotland--remarkable for how it was "removed" from the rock
Scientists have found that it's possible to stick a rock in a CT scanner, scan & digitize a fossil that's inside the rock, and then 3D print the fossil. This is enabling them to make some headway toward figuring out what was going on during "Romer's gap," a gap in the fossil record (or at least, everyone thought it was a gap) coinciding with the early evolution of tetrapods.
Fossilized Tomatoes, 52 million years old
Researchers have found fossils of ancestral tomatoes in Patagonia.
The Bears Ears, and what it means for paleontology
At the end of December, 2016, President Obama established the new Bears Ears National Monument, in Utah. Much of the discussion of the new national monument has focused on environmental protection and the preservation of archeological sites, But the region also has paleontological importance. Here is one interesting discussion by a researcher who works in the region.