Learn how the fossils of ancient organisms help scientists navigate deep time — and uncover Earth’s hidden history.

A CENTURY and a quarter have passed since William Smith's "Strata Identified by Organized Fossils" (1816–19), with its figures of some 160 British fossils, made the long-delayed announcement of the ...

Mysterious fossils can be used to tell time in the deep past. For decades, one of the most abundant kinds of fossils on Earth, numbering in the millions of specimens, was a mystery to paleontologists.

There are few bigger questions than those surrounding the origins of life. So when Nature published a study revealing the world’s oldest known microfossils, it quickly became one of the most widely ...

For over 300 million years, the ammonites ruled the prehistoric seas. Finding an ammonite fossil isn’t particularly rare (they can be unearthed all over the world) but they’re still thrilling to ...