Palaeontology articles from across Nature Portfolio

Fossils reveal that at least four types of hominin, including Paranthropus, were present in northern Ethiopia between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago.

Eyes on a face’s front or side enable a brain to perceive images. Fossil evidence suggests that two light-sensitive organs on top of ancient vertebrate heads generated images, too.

The accuracy of eyewitness evidence is questioned, and a fossil collection examined when a geological society moves its London home in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

The Huayuan biota exhibits extraordinary biodiversity, illuminating the impact of the Phanerozoic mass extinction around 513 million years ago and offering critical insights into the transformation of global ecosystems in the early Cambrian.

Early vertebrates, particularly myllokunmingids, possessed four camera-type eyes (a pair of lateral eyes and pineal and parapineal organs), which indicates that these structures functioned in image formation, in support of the hypothesis that the four camera-type eyes represent an ancestral vertebrate trait.

With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in eastern Africa.

The oldest sepioid in the Cretaceous shows intermediate morphologies between cuttlefish and bobtail squids, revealing their early evolution. This discovery was facilitated by Digital fossil-mining method incorporating a zero-shot learning AI model.

Naturally mummified cheetah remains in a Saudi Arabian cave system with radiocarbon-calibrated ages between about 4,200 and 100 years cluster with Asian as well as West-African sub-species, with implications for rewilding efforts, suggests a genomic analysis of the remains.

Fossils reveal that at least four types of hominin, including Paranthropus, were present in northern Ethiopia between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago.

Eyes on a face’s front or side enable a brain to perceive images. Fossil evidence suggests that two light-sensitive organs on top of ancient vertebrate heads generated images, too.

The accuracy of eyewitness evidence is questioned, and a fossil collection examined when a geological society moves its London home in this week’s pick from the Nature archive.

A rare sample from a woolly rhinoceros reveals how the population changed in the lead-up to the species’ extinction.

Discoveries in Jurassic rocks reveal that birds were adept fliers earlier than scientists realized.

Surprising fossil finds in a Moroccan quarry reveal 773,000-year-old hominin specimens that are close to the ancestor of modern humans.