“Mirasaura teaches us that a feather is only one of the many wondrous things that reptiles evolved to grow out of their skin,” wrote Yale University evolutionary biologist Richard Prum in an essay ...

The evolutionary history of the mock viper, a mildly venomous, widely distributed Asian snake that mimics highly venomous vipers for self-defense, has been solved. The mock viper represents a ...

New discoveries of fossil clawed footprints from Australia, published in Nature, push the origin of reptiles back in time by at least 35 million years and change the entire timeline for the origin of ...

New fossil finds from Australia prove that the first reptile-like land animals colonized the mainland 350 million years ago. This is significantly earlier than previously assumed.

The origin of turtles has always been a bit of a puzzle for scientists who study the evolution of animals. To this day, where they fit in the tree of life remains a highly debated topic. The ...

Reptiles have been growing armor in their skin on and off for hundreds of millions of years, but scientists never fully understood how it evolved. A massive new evolutionary study shows these skin ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptilelike animal, dated to around 350 million years ago. The discovery suggests that after the first ...

"I'm stunned." says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, who coordinated the study; "A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when ...

Mock vipers not only look like tree-dwelling vipers but also act like them. Intriguingly, they have a fake ‘fang’ in the front of their mouth, which befools a predator into thinking that they possess ...

The origin of turtles has always been a bit of a puzzle for scientists who study the evolution of animals. To this day, where they fit in the tree of life remains a highly debated topic. The ...