The fossil record is crucial for understanding the origins and diversification of amphibians and reptiles. New discoveries ...

Ichthyosaurs represent a diverse clade of Mesozoic marine reptiles that rapidly adapted to fully aquatic lifestyles following the end-Permian mass extinction. Their streamlined, 'fish-like' body plan, ...

Challenging a 75-year-old notion about how and when reptiles evolved during the past 300 million-plus years involves a lot of camerawork, loads of CT scanning, and, most of all, thousands of miles of ...

An extinct reptile’s oddly shaped chompers, fingers, and ear bones may tell us quite a bit about the resilience of life on Earth, according to a new study. In fact, paleontologists at Yale, Sam ...

Viviparity, the live-bearing mode of reproduction, has evolved independently in several vertebrate lineages, including squamate reptiles and seahorses. In reptiles, evolutionary transitions from ...

Body coverings such as hair and feathers have played a central role in evolution. They enabled warm-bloodedness by insulating the body, and were used for courtship, display, deterrence of enemies and, ...

After making a splash in early 2025 with the identification of its 183-million-year-old fossilized skin, the plesiosaur fossil MH7 (Holzmaden specimen), uncovered in Germany, is making headlines again ...

The specimen shows that modern tuatara found in New Zealand are little changed from ancestors that lived 190 million years ago. By Jack Tamisiea New Zealand’s tuatara look like somber iguanas. But ...

A groundbreaking fossil discovery in northern Victoria, Australia, is shaking up paleontology. Fossilized footprints from the Carboniferous Period, around 359 million years ago, suggest that reptiles ...

A boom in reptile abundance and diversity around 250 million years ago may have resulted from soaring temperatures beginning millions of years earlier, rather than filling the gap left by a mass ...