Life
Scientists Say: Theropod
This group of dinosaurs once included Tyrannosaurus rex. Today, they include birds.
Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
More Stories in Biological Evolution: Unity and Diversity
- Humans
Scientists Say: Midden
One ancient person’s, or animal’s, trash may become an archeologist’s treasure.
- Humans
Humans have used fire far longer than anyone realized
Cave dirt suggests one ancestral species was using fire around 1.8 million years ago. That pushes back the earliest known use by about 800,000 years.
- Fossils
A new dino may be the culprit in an ancient murder mystery
The new microraptor, Jian changmaensis, may have snacked on birds when not gliding through northwestern China some 120 million years ago.
- Animals
Giant school bus–sized octopuses may have once ruled the oceans
Some of these predators were as long as whales. Roaming the seas more than 72 million years ago, the octopuses appear to have been the largest invertebrates ever known.
- Animals
The dawn of animal evolution saw a bizarre array of sea creatures
Newfound fossils turned up a strange zoo of often-complex creatures, including some suggesting that evolution of left-right symmetry occurred earlier than once though.
- Life
Some of these Smithsonian secrets might just blow your mind
Millions of treasures stashed in this museum storage site — open only to select visitors — tell the history of Earth's inhabitants.
- Archaeology
These 12,000-year-old Native American dice are the oldest in the world
A study of ancient artifacts suggests Native American dice games began thousands of years earlier than previously documented.
- Life
Looking for LUCA, everyone’s shared ancestor
You and all other living things descended from a single organism — our great-grand-germ. Scientists are studying modern genes to learn more about this very distant ancestor.
- Animals
Let’s learn about the platypus
Every new discovery about platypuses reveals them to be even odder than we thought.
