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.

A study of our past suggests some surprising things about our future. We’ll likely to live longer, become taller, and more lightly built. We may become more attractive. We’ll be less aggressive, and more agreeable, but with smaller brains. Imagine a species of tall, willowy, long-lived supermodels. We’ll be beautiful, but with the personality of a Golden Retriever- friendly, maybe not that bright.

A handful of broken vertebrae hint at a new, large species raptor that prowled England during the Early Cretaceous.

Tetrapodophis is snek.

It wasn’t necessarily inevitable that fire, or spearpoints, axes, ornament or bows would be discovered when they were. Then, as now, one person could literally change the course of history, with nothing more than an idea.

Sierraceratops, a new horned dinosaur from the Southwest, fits a familiar pattern- different dinosaurs in different parts of the North American continent. Why do we find this?

Snakes originated in the time of the dinosaurs, but fossils of dinosaur-era snakes suggest they were distantly related to living snakes. An evolutionary tree of modern snakes, reconstructed using DNA, suggests that only a handful of species survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction- and underwent an explosive diversification in the aftermath.

Homo sapiens uses an incredible range of chemicals to alter our minds. When and how did this peculiar habit develop?