In 2016, our colleague Xing Lida held up a small piece of polished, deeply yellow amber. As sunlight shone through the ancient resin, Lida saw the outline of a pristinely preserved, amazingly small ...

Piecing together the crushed skull of a fossil bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs helped researchers extrapolate what its brain would have looked like: big olfactory bulbs would have meant that ...

Paleontologists have uncovered an exceptionally complete skull of a massive bird that lived 45 million years ago. This fossilized skull belonged to now-extinct Diatryma, a flightless bird that reached ...

An artist’s interpretation of Vegavis iaai diving for fish in the shallow ocean off the coast of the Antarctic peninsula, with ammonites and plesiosaurs for company. A new study in Nature describing a ...

From emus to woodpeckers, modern birds show remarkable diversity in skull shape and size, often hypothesized to be the result of a sudden hastening of evolution following the mass extinction that ...

Monisha Ravisetti was a science writer at CNET. She covered climate change, space rockets, mathematical puzzles, dinosaur bones, black holes, supernovas, and sometimes, the drama of philosophical ...

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact triggered the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs. Yet, some early birds, ...

From emus to woodpeckers, modern birds show remarkable diversity in skull shape and size, often hypothesized to be the result of a sudden hastening of evolution following the mass extinction that ...