One of the craziest facts I learned studying marine reptiles is that certain plesiosaurs- polycotylids and leptocleidids- have an extra bone in the forearm and lower limb, which as far as I know isn't seen in any other animals. 

70 million years ago, duckbill dinosaurs crossed hundreds of miles of open water to colonize Africa- and then underwent an evolutionary radiation

Stephen King’s classic manual of fiction writing isn’t so much a guide to writing novels as a philosophy of creative work

How did hunter-gatherers manage to create giant stone circles atop a mountaintop in Turkey? Rather than suggesting a new model for the emergence of complex societies, Gobeklitepi may confirm traditional ideas.

Did the large size of Homo sapiens’ social groups give us the edge needed to outcompete other hominins?

Khinjaria acutus, from the Maastrichtian of Morocco, is a freakish new species of mosasaur, with a demon’s face and teeth like knives. Why were there so many species of apex predator at the end of the Cretaceous?

A new species of ornithischian suggests that Europe had its own, distinctive lineage of small herbivores— the Hypsilophodontidae— that weren’t closely related to anything else

Stelladens was a mosasaur with very, very weird teeth

Why did humans replace Neanderthals? In many ways, they seem to have been as intelligent as us. It’s possible that Homo sapiens’ larger bands and tribes gave us an edge.

Would intelligence and civilization have evolved if dinosaurs had continued to dominate the planet? Maybe not.

Just how many times was the New World discovered? At least seven times. Maybe more.

66 million years ago, at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, mosasaurs ruled the seas. And one mosasaur ruled all the others.

What are the fossils of a small plesiosaur- a “marine reptile”- doing in a Cretaceous river system? Maybe they lived there.