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Originally published by Field Museum, on March 5, 2024 Illustration showing the fossil skeleton of Imparavis Attenborough , alongside a reconstruction of the bird in life. Credit: Ville Sinkkonen. No birds alive today have teeth. But that wasn't always the case; many early fossil birds had beaks full of sharp, tiny teeth . In a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research , scientists have described a new species of fossil bird that was the first of its kind to evolve toothlessness ; its name, in honor of naturalist Sir David Attenborough, means " Attenborough's strange bird ." "It is a great honor to have one's name attached to a fossil, particularly one as spectacular and important as this. It seems the history of birds is more complex than we knew," says Sir David Attenborough. All birds are dinosaurs , but not all dinosaurs fall into the specialized type of dinosaurs known as birds, sort of like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectang...

Originally published by Curtin University, on January 15, 2024 The Welsh countryside near the Coed Cochion Quarry, where the fossils were found. Credit: Curtin University Curtin-led research has for the first time precisely dated some of the oldest fossils of complex multicellular life in the world , helping to track a pivotal moment in the history of Earth when the seas began teeming with new lifeforms —after 4 billion years of containing only single-celled microbes. The research paper, "U–Pb zircon-rutile dating of the Llangynog Inlier, Wales : Constraints on an Ediacaran shallow 1 marine fossil assemblage from East Avalonia," appears in the Journal of the Geological Society . Lead author Ph.D. student Anthony Clarke, from the Timescales of Mineral Systems Group within Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences , said to determine the age of the fossils , researchers used volcanic ash layers like bookmarks in the geological sequence. " Located in ...