Our bones did not begin deep inside the body. They started in the skin, not long after the first complex animals took shape.

For more than a century, biologists assumed that the bony plates embedded in the skin of lizards – like natural chain mail – ...

Fossilized footprints discovered in southeastern Australia, dating back approximately 355 million years, have forced scientists to rethink the timeline of reptile evolution. Detailed in a recent study ...

Ichthyosaurs represent a diverse clade of Mesozoic marine reptiles that rapidly adapted to fully aquatic lifestyles following the end-Permian mass extinction. Their streamlined, 'fish-like' body plan, ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptilelike animal, dated to around 350 million years ago. The discovery suggests that after the first ...

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 ...

The evolution of feathers in ancient animals was restricted to dinosaurs and their modern bird descendants. However, a reptile of the Middle Triassic period evolved something similar to feathers, ...

"I'm stunned." says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, who coordinated the study; "A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when ...

Body coverings such as hair and feathers have played a central role in evolution. They enabled warm-bloodedness by insulating the body, and were used for courtship, display, deterrence of enemies and, ...

About 230 million years ago, almost 80 million years before the first bird appeared, their distantly related cousins, the pterosaurs took to the sky, as the first group of active fliers among the ...

A fossil found over two decades ago on England’s Jurassic Coast has proved to be one of the most significant discoveries of marine reptiles in recent times. The almost complete skeleton of a ...