Topic
Scientific results produced by re-examining long-held museum specimens rather than by new fieldwork.
Smithsonian and Penn State researchers sampled more than 370 museum frogs from Boracéia, Brazil, and found chytrid fungus only in specimens from the 1980s. The timing matches the 1979 to 1982 die-offs that some scientists had blamed on climate or extreme weather.
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
The holotype of Montsecosuchus depereti has been in a Barcelona museum for more than a century. A team led from the Institut Catala de Paleontologia put it under UV and got scales, chest cartilage and a tail pattern.
Reality
Praearcturus gigas carried pincers longer than 16 centimetres and hunted 415 million years ago, before trees and before the high-oxygen atmosphere palaeontologists usually invoke to explain giant arthropods.
Reality
Matthijs Wibier read the faded Latin under ultraviolet light and found provisions that match no surviving Roman code, which is a real find and also a measure of how little fourth-century law survives.
Reality
University of Oklahoma paleontologists report preserved feeding tissue in Dendrocrinus simcoensis. Two specimens against a fossil record of millions sets the limit on what it can prove.
Reality
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