Ancient DNA News

August 22, 2025

Top Headlines

Scientists Just Uncovered Three Ancient Worlds Frozen Beneath Illinois for 300 Million Years

Aug. 9, 2025 — Over 300 million years ago, Illinois teemed with life in tropical swamps and seas, now preserved at the famous Mazon Creek fossil site. Researchers from the University of Missouri and geologist ...

Scientists Say Next Few Years Vital to Securing the Future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet

June 3, 2025 — Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be triggered with very little ocean warming above present-day, leading to a devastating four meters of global sea level rise to play out over hundreds ...

Geological Time Capsule Highlights Great Barrier Reef's Resilience

June 2, 2025 — New research adds to our understanding of how rapidly rising sea levels due to climate change foreshadow the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it. The findings suggest the reef can withstand rising sea levels in isolation but is vulnerable to ...

New Velvet Worm Species a First for the Arid Karoo

May 30, 2025 — A new species of velvet worm, Peripatopsis barnardi, represents the first ever species from the arid Karoo, which indicates that the area was likely historically more forested than at present. In the Cape Fold Mountains, we now know that every ...

New Method Provides the Key to Accessing Proteins in Ancient Human Remains

May 30, 2025 — A new method could soon unlock the vast repository of biological information held in the proteins of ancient soft tissues. The findings could open up a new era for palaeobiological ...

Dinosaurs Could Hold Key to Cancer Discoveries

May 29, 2025 — New techniques used to analyze soft tissue in dinosaur fossils may hold the key to new cancer discoveries. Researchers have analyzed dinosaur fossils using advanced paleoproteomic techniques, a method that holds promise for uncovering molecular data ...

Long Shot Science Leads to Revised Age for Land-animal Ancestor

May 29, 2025 — The fossils of ancient salamander-like creatures in Scotland are among the most well-preserved examples of early stem tetrapods -- some of the first animals to make the transition from water to land. Thanks to new research, scientists believe that ...

Leprosy Existed in America Long Before Arrival of Europeans

May 29, 2025 — Long considered a disease brought to the Americas by European colonizers, leprosy may actually have a much older history on the American continent. Scientists reveal that a recently identified second species of bacteria responsible for leprosy, ...

Birds Nested in Arctic Alongside Dinosaurs

May 29, 2025 — Spring in the Arctic brings forth a plethora of peeps and downy hatchlings as millions of birds gather to raise their young. The same was true 73 million years ago, according to a new article. The paper documents the earliest-known example of birds ...

Europe's Most Complete Stegosaurian Skull Unearthed in Teruel, Spain

May 29, 2025 — Palaeontologists have analyzed the most complete stegosaurian skull ever found in Europe and rewritten the evolutionary history of this iconic group of ...

Chemists Recreate How RNA Might Have Reproduced for First Time

May 29, 2025 — Chemists have demonstrated how RNA (ribonucleic acid) might have replicated itself on early Earth -- a key process in the origin of ...

Earliest Use of Psychoactive and Medicinal Plant 'Harmal' Identified in Iron Age Arabia

May 23, 2025 — A new study uses metabolic profiling to uncover ancient knowledge systems behind therapeutic and psychoactive plant use in ancient ...

Latest Headlines

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Ancient Fossil Discovery in Ethiopia Rewrites Human Origins

Aug. 21, 2025 — In the deserts of Ethiopia, scientists uncovered fossils showing that early members of our genus Homo lived side by side with a newly identified species of Australopithecus nearly three million years ...

140,000-Year-Old Skeleton Shows Earliest Interbreeding Between Humans and Neanderthals

Aug. 21, 2025 — Scientists have uncovered the world s earliest fossil showing both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens features: a five-year-old child from Israel s Skhul ...

Bizarre Ancient Creatures Unearthed in the Grand Canyon

Aug. 14, 2025 — A groundbreaking fossil discovery in the Grand Canyon has unveiled exquisitely preserved soft-bodied animals from the Cambrian period, offering an unprecedented glimpse into early life more than 500 ...

Tiny Ancient Whale With a Killer Bite Found in Australia

Aug. 13, 2025 — An extraordinary fossil find along Victoria’s Surf Coast has revealed Janjucetus dullardi, a sharp-toothed, dolphin-sized predator that lived 26 million years ago. With large eyes, slicing teeth, ...

A 16-Million-Year-Old Amber Fossil Just Revealed the Smallest Predator Ant Ever Found

Aug. 9, 2025 — A fossilized Caribbean dirt ant, Basiceros enana, preserved in Dominican amber, reveals the species ancient range and overturns assumptions about its ...

Stunning “wonder Reptile” Discovery Rewrites the Origins of Feathers

Aug. 9, 2025 — The newly described Mirasaura grauvogeli from the Middle Triassic had a striking feather-like crest, hinting that complex skin appendages arose far earlier than previously believed. Its bird-like ...

Scientists Reexamine 47-Year-Old Fossil and Discover a New Jurassic Sea Monster

Aug. 4, 2025 — A new long-necked marine reptile, Plesionectes longicollum, has been identified from a decades-old fossil found in Germany’s Posidonia Shale. The ...

400-Million-Year-Old Fish Exposes Big Mistake in How We Understood Evolution

July 29, 2025 — A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species ...

A Tiny Dinosaur Bone Just Rewrote the Origin of Bird Flight

July 24, 2025 — A tiny, overlooked wrist bone called the pisiform may have played a pivotal role in bird flight and it turns out it evolved far earlier than scientists thought. Fossils from bird-like dinosaurs in ...

A Dusty Fossil Drawer Held a 300-Million-Year-Old Evolutionary Game-Changer

July 24, 2025 — A century-old fossil long mislabeled as a caterpillar has been reidentified as the first-known nonmarine lobopodian—rewriting what we know about ancient life. Discovered in Harvard’s museum ...

A 500-Million-Year-Old Fossil Just Rewrote the Spider Origin Story

July 24, 2025 — Half a billion years ago, a strange sea-dwelling creature called Mollisonia symmetrica may have paved the way for modern spiders. Using detailed fossil brain analysis, researchers uncovered neural ...

Inside the Maya King’s Tomb That Rewrites Mesoamerican History

July 12, 2025 — A major breakthrough in Maya archaeology has emerged from Caracol, Belize, where the University of Houston team uncovered the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak—Caracol’s first known ruler. Buried with ...

Tiny Fossil With Razor Teeth Found by Student — Rewrites Mammal History

July 12, 2025 — A university student on a fossil-hunting field trip in Dorset made a stunning discovery: a 145-million-year-old jawbone belonging to a previously unknown mammal species with razor-like teeth. With ...

North America’s Oldest Pterosaur Unearthed in Arizona’s Triassic Time Capsule

July 8, 2025 — In the remote reaches of Arizona s Petrified Forest National Park, scientists have unearthed North America's oldest known pterosaur a small, gull-sized flier that once soared above Triassic ...

These 545-Million-Year-Old Fossil Trails Just Rewrote the Story of Evolution

June 27, 2025 — A groundbreaking study suggests that the famous Cambrian explosion—the dramatic burst of diverse animal life—might have actually started millions of years earlier than we thought. By analyzing ...

Buried for 23,000 Years: These Footprints Are Rewriting American History

June 29, 2025 — Footprints found in the ancient lakebeds of White Sands may prove that humans lived in North America 23,000 years ago — much earlier than previously believed. A new study using radiocarbon-dated ...

Monster Salamander With Powerful Jaws Unearthed in Tennessee Fossil Find

June 17, 2025 — A massive, extinct salamander with jaws like a vice once roamed ancient Tennessee and its fossil has just rewritten what we thought we knew about Appalachian amphibians. Named Dynamognathus ...

The 10,000-Mile March Through Fire That Made Dinosaurs Possible

June 13, 2025 — Despite Earth's most devastating mass extinction wiping out over 80% of marine life and half of land species, a group of early reptiles called archosauromorphs not only survived but thrived, ...

What a Dinosaur Ate 100 Million Years ago—Preserved in a Fossilized Time Capsule

June 10, 2025 — A prehistoric digestive time capsule has been unearthed in Australia: plant fossils found inside a sauropod dinosaur offer the first definitive glimpse into what these giant creatures actually ate. ...

2,000 Miles Through Rivers and Ice: Mapping Neanderthals’ Hidden Superhighways Across Eurasia

June 10, 2025 — Neanderthals may have trekked thousands of miles across Eurasia much faster than we ever imagined. New computer simulations suggest they used river valleys like natural highways to cross daunting ...

160 Million Years Ago, This Fungus Pierced Trees Like a Microscopic Spear

June 8, 2025 — In a paper published in National Science Review, a Chinese team of scientists highlights the discovery of well-preserved blue-stain fungal hyphae within a Jurassic fossil wood from northeastern ...

Researchers Recreate Ancient Egyptian Blues

June 2, 2025 — Researchers have recreated the world's oldest synthetic pigment, called Egyptian blue, which was used in ancient Egypt about 5,000 years ...

Mystery of 'Very Odd' Elasmosaur Finally Solved: Fiercely Predatory Marine Reptile Is New Species

May 23, 2025 — A mysterious sea monster fossil discovered decades ago in British Columbia has finally revealed its true identity — and it’s unlike anything scientists have seen before. Named Traskasaura ...

Different Phases of Evolution During Ice Age

May 23, 2025 — Cold-adapted animals started to evolve 2.6 million years ago when the permanent ice at the poles became more prevalent. There followed a time when the continental ice sheets expanded and contracted ...

Ancient DNA Used to Map Evolution of Fever-Causing Bacteria

May 22, 2025 — Researchers have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through lice rather than ticks, and how it ...

Scientists Have Figured out How Extinct Giant Ground Sloths Got So Big and Where It All Went Wrong

May 22, 2025 — Scientists have analyzed ancient DNA and compared more than 400 fossils from 17 natural history museums to figure out how and why extinct sloths got so ...

Climate Change Poses Severe Threat to Bowhead Whale Habitat

May 22, 2025 — New research examining 11,700 years of bowhead whale persistence throughout the Arctic projects that sea ice loss due to climate change will cause their habitat to severely contract by up to 75 per ...

Toothache from Eating Something Cold? Blame These Ancient Fish

May 21, 2025 — New research shows that dentine, the inner layer of teeth that transmits sensory information to nerves inside the pulp, first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient ...

'Sharkitecture:' A Nanoscale Look Inside a Blacktip Shark's Skeleton

May 20, 2025 — Using synchrotron X-ray nanotomography with detailed 3D imaging and in-situ mechanical testing, researchers are peering inside shark skeletons at the nanoscale, revealing a microscopic ...

Research Team Traces Evolutionary History of Bacterial Circadian Clock on Ancient Earth

May 20, 2025 — To better understand the circadian clock in modern-day cyanobacteria, a research team has studied ancient timekeeping systems. They examined the oscillation of the clock proteins KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC ...