Peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing research on fossil vertebrates, including new species descriptions and studies of evolution and systematics.
Portsmouth and Casablanca researchers name Ctenosuchus tenuidens, a 170-million-year-old Moroccan crocodile relative with needle-thin teeth. Its teeth were too fine for large prey, the researchers say, so it probably ate shrimp and tiny fish.
Reality
Two bird bones found near Richmond, Queensland, belong to Tenuicruris piscanexum, only the second Cretaceous bird formally named from Australia. In a record of fewer than a dozen bones, a second named species gives each new find something to be measured against.
Reality
Two Field Museum interns named Jeanerpeton, a 309-million-year-old amphibian relative the museum had filed under a known species. A co-author says that species name has become a catchall in the collection, so more fossils filed under it may prove to be separate animals.
Reality
Dinodontosaurus turns up outside South America for the first time, in Tanzanian rocks that also hold the world's oldest dinosaur candidates, and the South American sequences it matches carry younger radiometric dates.
Reality
Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, described from bones a British expedition collected in the 1960s, extends a South American genus into Tanzania. The shared genus argues that those Tanzanian beds are no older than South America's.
Reality
A sauropod from El Castellar in Spain has been identified as Diplodocus from its tail bones alone. The Teruel team takes the find as a sign that animals moved between Europe and North America late in the Jurassic.
Reality
Paleontologists at Fundación Dinópolis have assigned a partial tail from El Castellar, Spain, to Diplodocus, a genus known until now only from the Morrison Formation. Its closest known relative is a Morrison species.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
A new study reads trophic rank off damage on herbivore bone rather than off predator dimensions, and the answer is a caiman relative rather than a saber-toothed mammal.
Reality
Spea labreae was collected in the 1950s and named in 2026. The binding constraint on this kind of paleontology is re-examination time, not fresh excavation.
Reality