Topic
Scientific study of fossil vertebrates, covering their anatomy, evolution, classification, and the deposits in which they are preserved.
A dromaeosaurid most likely scavenged an 8-year-old Albertosaurus, a University of Alberta study of tooth marks on its jaw concludes. The case rests on one specimen, so it documents a single meal and cannot yet show how often small carnivores ate tyrannosaurs.
Reality
University of Kansas researchers found that about 30 Uintatherium anceps skulls lack the clear two-group split expected if the sexes differed sharply. Run on known-sex bison, the same tests split the sexes almost perfectly, so the long-cited fossil contrast looks overstated.
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
Priscilla Martinez's team pulled the tooth from a marine deposit at El Morro in northern Chile. Freshwater fish, gavials and palm phytoliths from the same beds carry more of the argument than the tooth does.
Reality
The 350-million-year-old radius is triangular and pointed where the wrist would be, and the upper arm bone is missing. It matches none of the 16 fishapods that Thomas Stewart's team at Penn State compared it against.
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
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The Field Museum holotype was mistaken for a tumour when it arrived in 1968. Sent through an X-ray CT scanner rather than cut open, the bones at the tail tip turned out to be about as normal as any viper's.
Reality
The Nebraska ash preserved rhinos still joined to their own skulls, yet the bone-crushing dogs that chewed them left only prints, bite marks and dung, and the current dig has ten to fifteen summers left to run.
Reality
The Abu-Tartur assemblage now runs to seven lamniform species. The phosphate bed that preserved them is a condensed section, which is why the authors read productivity out of it rather than a living community.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The mid-Cretaceous looks empty of dinosaurs largely because high seas left little but marine rock to search, and the one Canadian window onto land turns out to be churned with ornithopod prints. It waited 34 years for fieldwork.
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
A Japanese team says it found the first premaxilla known from any Japanese mosasaur inside rock collected in the early 1990s. The report is a conference presentation, not a described species.
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