Paleontology

Members of the Evolutionary Studies Initiative took a field trip to Coon Creek Science Center (CCSC) to dig for fossils. Read More

Over the past decade, Larisa DeSantis, paleontologist and associate professor of biological sciences, has worked with a team of former Vanderbilt undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and experts from across the globe to show how species can be both generalized at the species level and specialized individually—a probable key to their success. Read More

Looking at prehistoric organisms allows Simon Darroch and his students to describe how, when and why complex life evolved on this planet. Their work is a piece of the puzzle in understanding how likely it is that we’ll find complex life beyond Earth. Read More

The Vanderbilt Evolutionary Studies Initiative is hosting a free presentation by prominent paleoconservationist Michael Archer, who will discuss how understanding ancient life can help conservationists save endangered species today. The virtual event will be Wednesday, March 24, at 3:10 p.m. CT. Read More

The most detailed study to date of ancient predators trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits is helping Americans understand why today we’re dealing with coyotes dumping over garbage cans and not saber-toothed cats ripping our arms off. Read More

“They are behaving like animals, and that’s a link between them and what we recognize as animals," says paleontologist Simon A.F. Darroch. Read More

The team, one of the first in the world to examine the ability’s origins, used a small CT scanner to look inside a 30-million-year-old ear bone fossil from a specimen resembling Olympicetus avitus. Read More

Ediacara biota were forming complex communities tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion. Read More

Paleontologist Larisa DeSantis' latest research confirms that the shape of tooth wear best indicates the kind of food koalas and kangaroos ate, not whether it was covered in dust and dirt. Read More

A study of stalagmite records from the White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains finds the California coast was lashed by exceptionally wet and stormy weather for 150 years...8,200 years ago. Read More

Analysis of the microscopic wear on the teeth of three man-eating lions reveals that painful dental disease may have been what drove the cats to hunt humans instead of larger prey. Read More

A new study has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction. Read More

Fossils at the Fort is a free annual event providing young and old with an opportunity to journey into Middle Tennessee's astonishing ancient past. Read More

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Cougars may have survived a mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago because they were not particular about what they ate. Read More

The latest study of the microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of the American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed North America in the late Pleistocene found that they were living well off the fat of the land in the period just before they went extinct. Read More