A study by the University of Texas at Austin is providing a glimpse into dinosaur and bird diversity in Patagonia during the Late Cretaceous, just before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. The fossils represent the first record of theropods — a dinosaur group that includes both modern birds and their closest non-avian dinosaur relatives — from the Chilean portion of ...

Sixty million years of climate change triggered the meteoric rise of reptiles around 250 million years ago, not a mass extinction of mammals as previously thought,said a new study. Just over 250 million years ago, during the end of the Permian period, and start of the Triassic, reptiles’ rates of evolution and diversity started exploding, leading to a dizzying variety ...

Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants. That’s one conclusion drawn by the authors of a new study published in Systematic Biology. Cornell University Ph.D. candidate Jacob Berv and University of Bath Prize Fellow Daniel Field ...