Prehistoric animals
There is an enormous variety of life on Earth, currently around 10 million species. But as many as there are now, 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct - that makes a total of over five billion species in the history of the Earth. Of this 99 per cent, we mostly learn about them through palaeontology by studying fossils. Far from just dinosaurs, prehistoric animals are also made up of the reptiles, sea life and eventually mammals that came before and after.
Megalodon: The giant ancestor of today's sharks
Huge, terrifying and now with their own movie franchise. We give you the lowdown on one of the Earth's greatest ever apex predators.
Palaeontologists figure out how a pterosaur the size of a double-decker bus was able to fly
Quetzalcoatlus, the largest known animal capable of flight, launched itself into the air using its legs.
Stegosaurus: The enigmatic icon of the Jurassic
Why one of the most famous dinosaurs ever discovered is still keeping researchers guessing today.
How new X-ray scanning technology is revealing the secret lives of ancient animals
Palaeontologists using synchrotron X-ray scanning are calling it 'the superhero of visualisation'.
A gigantic guide to the mighty triceratops
Everything you want to know about the famous three-horned dinosaur.
10 monstrous beasts we're glad have gone extinct
We don't like to see animals go extinct, but we're happy we won't come face-to-face with these colossal creatures, which could crush today’s titans with ease.
The scary truth about Velociraptors
Behind the movie star persona, there's a dinosaur more fascinating than anything Hollywood dreamt up.
A single genetic change turned a fish’s fins into limbs
The discovery sheds light on how our ancient relatives first came onto land.
Loch Ness Monster: A timeline of sightings and searching
A century of sightings, evidence, investigations claims and counter claims – this is the chronological history of our search for the Loch Ness Monster.
Operation Deepscan | The hunt for the Loch Ness Monster
In 1987, Adrian Shine led Operation Deepscan – disproving once and for all the myths of the Loch Ness Monster
How do we know that the Loch Ness Monster doesn't exist?
Scientists are quite sure that there’s no such thing as the Loch Ness Monster, or Bigfoot, or Yeti. But how do we know for sure?
"Weird and wonderful" ancient amphibian had chameleon-like projectile tongue
Analysis of fossils trapped in amber has shown that albanerpetontids, an ancient amphibian creature, had "ballistic tongues" that they could fire at prey.
New species of Triassic marine reptile discovered
The small, lizard-like Brevicaudosaurus jiyangshanensis had neutral buoyancy, allowing it to walk along the seabed searching for prey.
First sabre-toothed cat genome reveals a lethal long-distance hunter
Its body was adapted for endurance running.
Ancient teeth reveal how the first mammals lived more like reptiles
Much like the rings of trees, growth rings in the tooth sockets revealed that early mammals led longer, slower-paced lives than researchers thought.
Pterosaur's sensitive beak helped it detect nearby prey
Scientists believe the tip of pterosaur's beak had clusters of nerves, which it used to find prey like 'a dabbling duck probing around shallow water'.
Prehistoric megalodon was a mega-shark that had 'fins as large as an entire adult human'
A 16-metre megalodon was thought to have had a head 4.65 metres long, a dorsal fin approximately 1.62 metres tall and a tail around 3.85 metres high.
Mastodons were driven north by climate change 2.5 million years ago
Present-day species like moose and beavers are expanding northwards in a similar way.
Ancient reptile ‘well-preserved’ in stomach of slightly larger reptile
A five-metre-long ichthyosaur ate a four-metre-long thalattosaur around 240 million years ago.
Extinct woolly rhinos were a victim of climate change, not overhunting
The woolly rhino went extinct around 14,000 to 15,000 years ago.
Mystery solved! 240-million-year-old reptile with 'extraordinarily long neck' lived in the ocean
Tanystropheus was first described in 1852 but until now, scientists didn't know whether the 6m-long reptile lived on land or under water because its "bizarre body didn’t make things clear".
De-extinction | Can we bring extinct animals back from the dead?
Mammoths, Tasmanian tigers and even Elvis could soon be brought back from the dead, thanks to intriguing advances in cloning and gene editing. But would they be the real thing?
Mammal evolution | How ancient fossils are revealing the secrets of our earliest ancestors
Before Tyrannosaurus rex and Diplodocus roamed the planet, a group of small animals were eking out a successful existence and would one day come to dominate - here’s how a bounty of new fossils is telling us their story.
Mammal evolution | Ancient mammals that lived in the age of dinosaurs
Our mammalian ancestors were eking out an existence even before T. rex came stomping along. We can reveal their story by studying beautiful, new fossils from China.