Vertebrate Paleontology News


  • LAWRENCE — The only dinosaur known to have lived in what is now Kansas, Silvisaurus condrayi, was designated the official state land fossil of Kansas, thanks in part to a Kansas rancher and a Goddard schoolteacher and his sixth-grade students. Teacher Joel Condray, his students from Challenger Intermediate School in…
  • LAWRENCE — Two sister species of near-primate, called “primatomorphans,” dating back about 52 million years have been identified by researchers at the University of Kansas as the oldest to have dwelled north of the Arctic Circle. The findings appear today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE. According to…
  • A new paper appearing in Biology Letters describes the oldest-known fragmentary bat fossils from Asia, pushing back the evolutionary record for bats on that continent to the dawn of the Eocene and boosting the possibility that the bat family’s “mysterious” origins someday might be traced to Asia. A team based at…
  • [Video] No Audio. Slow zoom out at Tanis site. A study to be published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a scientific first: a detailed snapshot of the terrible moments right after the Chicxulub impact — the most cataclysmic event known to have befallen life on Earth. At a site called…