Latest Extinct species Stories

The radula sounds like something from a horror movie – a conveyor belt lined with hundreds of rows of interlocking teeth. In fact, radulas are found in the mouths of most molluscs, from the giant squid to the garden snail. Now, a "prototype" radula found in 500-million-year-old fossils studied by University of Toronto graduate student Martin Smith, shows that the earliest radula was not a flesh-rasping terror, but a tool for humbly scooping food from the muddy sea floor. The Cambrian...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com A man in Iowa has discovered the remains of a woolly mammoth that laid to rest thousands of years ago in his backyard. The man, identified only as John, said that one of his sons found something while walking in the forest behind their property in 2010, and John realized that the object was a bone. “I got down on my hands and knees on the bank, and I could see a marrow line around the edge of this, and I said, ‘Boys, that’s a bone. That’s a really...

A strangely out-of-focus video was released by The Sun this week that shows a lumbering animal walking across a river in Siberia. The video alleges the animal to be a live woolly mammoth in what would be a remarkable find as the mammoth has been extinct for nearly 4,000 years. The footage was taken by a government-employed road surveyor last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, and is strangely reminiscent of the 40 year old Bigfoot film, brief and fuzzy. Many...

The description of an ancient amphibian that millions of years ago swam in quiet pools and caught mayflies on the surrounding land in Texas has set to rest one of the greatest current controversies in vertebrate evolution. The discovery was made by a research team led by scientists at the University of Calgary.The examination and detailed description of the fossil, Gerobatrachus hottoni (meaning Hotton's elder frog), proves the previously disputed fact that some modern amphibians, frogs and...

Humans may have struck the final blow that killed the woolly-mammoth, but climate change seems to have played a major part in setting up the end-game, according to a new study. Though mammoth populations declined severely around 12,000 years ago, they didn't completely disappear until around 3,600 years ago. Scientists have long debated what finally drove the furry beasts over the edge. Researchers led by David Nogues-Bravo of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in...

If you've been anywhere near a television set in the last six weeks, you've seen the ads for Roland Emmerich's "10,000 B.C." -- the woolly mammoths frolicking through ancient cities, the saber-toothed tiger shoving his face so close to the long-haired hero's that the poor, terrified human can smell the monkey on his breath. Let's not talk about the anachronism of all this -- whether or not mammoths, saber- tooths, people and massive desert cities were all contemporaneous. We're...

By Nita BhallaMARE-AUX-SONGES, Mauritius -- Hidden in the depths of sugarcane plantations, the marshlands of Mare-aux-Songes have been forgotten for centuriesBut the recent discovery of a mass grave of dodos, the extinct flightless bird whose name became synonymous with stupidity, has rekindled interest in learning how the bird lived, what it ate and its natural habitat.The rare find in southeast Mauritius by a Dutch-Mauritian team will enable researchers to discover more about the Indian...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A mass grave of dodos, the famous flightless bird whose name became synonymous with stupidity, has been uncovered in Mauritius, scientists said.The rare find will enable researchers to discover more about what happened to the bird, native to the Indian Ocean Island, which became extinct in the late 17th century.Scientists from the Dutch Natural History Museum in Leiden said the remains were at least 2,000 years old."This new find will allow for the first scientific...

JOHANNESBURG -- Scientists beware: don't count your extinct bird species because one of them may hatch.Several supposedly extinct birds have recently been "rediscovered," raising hopes that others not seen for ages may still be taking to the skies."The real message of rediscoveries is that we didn't look hard enough in the first place," said Nigel Collar of UK-based conservation group BirdLife International."We think we've explored the planet when we haven't. We have...