Scientists have discovered the fossils of Haliskia peterseni, a formidable pterosaur (flying reptile), in the Australian state of Queensland.

Haliskia, meaning “sea phantom”, boasted a bony crest at the tip of its upper and lower jaws and a mouthful of spike-shaped teeth ideal for snaring fish and other marine prey, and soared above the now-vanished Eromanga Sea. It had a wingspan of 15 feet and lived about 100 million years ago.

22% of Haliskia’s skeleton was unearthed, with complete lower jaws, the tip of the upper jaw, throat bones, 43 teeth, vertebrae, ribs, bones from both wings and part of one leg.

Pterosaurs were the first of three vertebrate groups to achieve powered flight, appearing about 230 million years ago. They were wiped out in the same mass extinction event as the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago, following an asteroid strike.

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Fossils? Uh, wait!

In 1725, Adam Beringer, dean of a university in Germany was terribly excited. The discovery involved several limestone pieces with carvings of different animals and inscriptions. So convinced was Adam that they were fossils that he even went on to write a book detailing his findings! It turned out, though, that it was two of his university colleagues who’d planted them where Adam often hunted for fossils! When they tried to point out that it could be fake, Adam not only got furious, but took them to court. Talk about a clever deception! Later, these pieces began to be called “lying stones”.

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Scientists have discovered remnants of the world’s oldest fossil forest — an extensive network of trees around 386 million years old — in a sandstone quarry in Cairo, New York, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. The fossil forest would have spread from New York all the way into Pennsylvania and beyond.

The research shows that the forest was home to at least two types of trees: Cladoxylopsids was a primitive tree-fern-like plants, lacked flat green leaves, while Archaeopteris, a conifer-like woody trunk with frond-like branches with green flattened leaves, is related to modern trees. All these trees reproduced using only spores rather than seeds. The team also reported a ‘spectacular’ and extensive network of roots, more than eleven metres in length in some places, belonging to the Archaeopteris trees.

At the time this ancient forest existed, no birds or vertebrates lived on land. Dinosaurs wouldn’t appear for another 150 million years. Instead, the forest was likely home to millipede-like bugs and other insects.

This forest reveals a key milestone in Earth’s climate history. As plants developed thick, carbon-rich wooden roots, they pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, changing the global composition of the planet’s air. Plants themselves became significant carbon sinks.

Researchers believe the forest was eventually wiped out by a flood, due to the presence of fish fossils that were also visible on the surface of the quarry.

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Researchers from Japan’s Okayama University of Science and the Mongolian Academy of Science came across a massive footprint that may have been left behind by a dinosaur in the Gobi Desert.

The fossil is more than 4 feet long with imprints of a Titanosaur’s claws. The long-necked herbivores stretched nearly 100 feet from tip to tail and stood almost 70 feet tall. Because of their enormous size, they walked on large stump-like legs that lacked toes, which might break under their weight.

The fossil footprint was created between 70 and 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous period.

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The limestone cliff of Cal Orcko in Bolivia is home to the world’s largest and most diverse collection of dinosaur footprints from the Cretaceous era, hosting around 5,000 dinosaur footprints dating back 68 million years. The prints belong to eight species, including the Titanosaur that weighed up to 100 tonnes. The location used to be the shore of a lake that attracted a large number of herbivorous and carnivorous dinosaurs. In damp weather, the creatures’ feet sank and left marks in the shoreline that were solidified by later periods of drought. The wet-dry pattern repeated several times, preserving multiple layers of prints. Tectonic upheaval then pushed the flat ground up to the viewing angle today.

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Josephoartigasia monesi, a rodent closely related to guinea pigs, lived in South America around 3 million years ago. With an estimated body mass of 1000 kg it was similar in size to a buffalo! An almost complete skull (the largest fossil rodent ever found), unearthed from San José Formation in Uruguay, is preserved in the National History and Anthropology Museum of Uruguay. The animal lived during the Pliocene period, an era marked by an abundance of large animals including the first mammoths.

Scientists found that although the rodent’s bite forces were very large — around 1400 Newtons, similar to that of a tiger, its incisors would have been able to withstand almost three times that force. They concluded that it must have used its incisors for other activities too, such as digging in the ground for food or defending itself from predators, similar to how a modern-day elephant uses its tusks.

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