The biggest turtle ever described wasn’t an ancestor of today’s leatherback turtles or any other living sea turtles. But it looks like there are some things about being a giant, skin-shelled sea turtle that just work, no matter where, or...

Among the dinosaurs, giant sea dragons roamed the ancient ocean. Millions of years later, paleontologist Dean R. Lomax and his team freed the remains of one of these colossal creatures from the Earth. Settle in to learn about the...

Paleontologists have been studying nodosaurs since the 1830s, but nobody had ever found a specimen like Borealopelta before. The key to its exceptional preservation was where it ended up after it died and how it got there.

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

Sea scorpions thrived for 200 million years, coming in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Over time, they developed a number of adaptations--from crushing claws to flattened tails for swimming. And some of them adapted by getting so big...

While dinosaurs were dominating the land, the metriorhynchids were thriving in the seas. But taking that plunge wasn’t easy because it takes a very special set of traits to fully dedicate yourself to life at sea.

In 1977, a farmer was plowing his field on a plateau high in the Andes mountains when he stumbled upon a giant fossilized skeleton. How did this giant marine reptile end up high in the Andes Mountains?

How could a body of water as big as the Mediterranean just...disappear? It would take decades and more than 1,000 research studies to even start to figure out the cause -- or causes -- of one of the greatest vanishing acts in Earth’s...

Natural history is full of living things that were long thought to have gone extinct only to show up again, alive and well. Paleontologists have a word for these kinds of organisms: They call them Lazarus taxa.

Back in the late Miocene epoch, there was an island--or maybe a group of islands-- in the Mediterranean Sea that was populated with fantastic giant beasts. It’s a lesson in the very strange, but very real, powers of natural selection.

As it turns out, the Jurassic Park films are not entirely accurate. Aubrey Jane Roberts, a National Geographic Young Explorers grantee and professional dinosaur hunter (aka paleontologist) loves the films but laments the fact that they...

A close look at a specimen paid off for paleontologist Sven Sachs of the Bielefeld Natural History Museum in Germany. The fossil was originally discovered in the mid 1990s in Somerset, England. Sachs correctly identified the genus of the...

Today, we think of penguins as small-ish, waddling, tuxedo-birds. But they evolved from a flying ancestor, were actual giants for millions of years, and some of them were even dressed a little more casually.

At more than 2 meters long, Aegirocassis was not only the biggest radiodont ever, but it also may have been the biggest animal in the Early Ordovician. This bizarre marine giant may have only been possible, thanks to a major revolution...

Tiny exoskeleton fragments may have allowed some of the most important microbes in the planet’s history to set sail out into the open ocean and change the world forever.

Natural history is full of living things that were long thought to have gone extinct only to show up again, alive and well. Paleontologists have a word for these kinds of organisms: They call them Lazarus taxa.

Paleontologists think they've solved part of the mystery of the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a dense bed of Jurassic dinosaur fossils. Also, electron microscope images reveal new, mucus-drenched info about the tubelip wrasse.

Fossils are the preserved remains of plants or animals from long ago, such as dinosaurs, that have turned into stone over time. They can be found in various locations like mountains, underwater, and even underground. Fossil discoveries,...

If you get most of your information about ancient animals from vintage cartoons or action figures, then a lot of things that you think of as "dinosaurs" actually weren't. Learn about the definition of true dinosaurs and the evolutionary...

This week, a group of scientists estimated the cost of saving just one small village in America’s Chesapeake Bay from rising sea levels, and another found evidence that Smilodon (aka the saber-toothed cat) actually helped take care of...

Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent...

Sixty-six million years ago, near what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula, a juvenile sauropod feasted on horsetail plants on a riverbank. Earth was a tropical planet. Behemoth and tiny dinosaurs alike soared its skies and roamed its lands...

The theory of evolution states that individuals within a species show wide degrees of variation, and those individuals with characteristics best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce. This theory grew from...

On the first day of the 2015 summer internship season, host Katrina Jackson meets a wide variety of incoming Goddard interns who are working on projects such as web design, engineering, environmental education, finance, CubeSats, sea...