The evolutionary history of the mock viper, a mildly venomous, widely distributed Asian snake that mimics highly venomous vipers for self-defense, has been solved. The mock viper represents a ...

New discoveries of fossil clawed footprints from Australia, published in Nature, push the origin of reptiles back in time by at least 35 million years and change the entire timeline for the origin of ...

“Mirasaura teaches us that a feather is only one of the many wondrous things that reptiles evolved to grow out of their skin,” wrote Yale University evolutionary biologist Richard Prum in an essay ...

WASHINGTON — Scientists in Australia have identified the oldest known fossil footprints of a reptilelike animal, dated to around 350 million years ago. The discovery suggests that after the first ...

New fossil finds from Australia prove that the first reptile-like land animals colonized the mainland 350 million years ago. This is significantly earlier than previously assumed.

Reptiles have been growing armor in their skin on and off for hundreds of millions of years, but scientists never fully understood how it evolved. A massive new evolutionary study shows these skin ...

The discovery of a giant marine reptile skull in the United States has revealed new theories about the speed of evolution and how quickly the process can produce diversity. The giant ichthyosaur ...

Following careful study of a prehistoric skull of a new species unearthed in Madagascar, Azendohsaurus madagaskarensis, it turns out Azendohsaurus is not an early dinosaur as long assumed, but rather ...

"I'm stunned." says Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University, who coordinated the study; "A single track-bearing slab, which one person can lift, calls into question everything we thought we knew about when ...

Mock vipers not only look like tree-dwelling vipers but also act like them. Intriguingly, they have a fake ‘fang’ in the front of their mouth, which befools a predator into thinking that they possess ...