Species of gigantic animals that once roamed Australia were long gone by the time people arrived, a major review of the available evidence has concluded.

The research challenges the claim that humans were primarily responsible for the demise of the megafauna in a proposed "extinction window" between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago, and points the finger instead at climate change.

Why did saber-toothed cats, hyenas, an extinct 'bear-dog', ancestors of the red panda and several other carnivores die under unusual circumstances in a Spanish cave near Madrid approximately 10 million years ago?

Different scenarios have been floated for why an unusually large concentration of healthy adult carnivores died in this cave during the Late Miocene, a location known now as Batallones-1 fossil site, Madrid Basin, Spain; accidental falls into the cave, maybe the animals died in other locations and were washed into the cave, everything but mass suicide. 

Yet those scenarios would mean mean herbivores also got trapped.  And not just healthy adults.

A tiny fossil, the nearly complete skeleton of a bird that would have fit in the palm of your hand and weighed less than an ounce, offers clues to the precursors of swift and hummingbird wings. The fossil
discovered in Wyoming
is unusual in having exceptionally well-preserved feathers, which allowed the researchers to reconstruct the size and shape of the bird's wings in ways not possible with bones alone.

The paleontologists spotted the specimen, which was collected at the Green River Formation, while they were working at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and named it Eocypselus rowei, in honor of John W. Rowe, Chairman of the Field Museum's Board of Trustees.

An unusual fossil of Euphanerops, a fossil jawless fish that swam in the seas around 370 million years ago, has fins behind its anus - a pair of them.  The find makes the fish one of the first vertebrate to develop paired appendages such as fins, legs or arms. 

In a first, a whale skeleton has been found on the ocean floor near Antarctica, almost a mile below the surface in an undersea crater. With it were at least nine new species of deep-sea organisms thriving on the bones. 

A study has documented detailed records of dinosaur egg fossils in the Coll de Nargó archaeological site in Lleida, Spain and found there are four. Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region. 

The archaeological site in Coll de Nargó is home to different types of geological formations, including the Areniscas de Arén Formation and the Tremp Formation, which have provided a rich and varied yield of dinosaur fossils through the entire Pyrenees region.

The first evidence for an extinct giant camel in Canada's High Arctic has been revealed. The discovery is based on 30 fossil fragments of a leg bone found on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut and represents the most northerly record for early camels, whose ancestors are known to have originated in North America some 45 million years ago. 

The fossils were collected over three summer field seasons (2006, 2008 and 2010) and are about three-and-a-half million years old, dating from the mid-Pliocene Epoch. Other fossil finds at the site suggest this High Arctic camel lived in a boreal-type forest environment, during a global warm phase on the planet.

Remarkably well-preserved fossils of two crocodilians and a mammal previously unknown to science during recent Panama Canal excavations have led to discovering of new species.

The two new ancient, extinct alligator-like animals and an extinct hippo-like species inhabited Central America during the Miocene about 20 million years ago.  The fossils shed new light on scientists' understanding of species distribution because they represent a time before the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, when the continents of North and South America were separated by oceanic waters.