To understand the environmental pressures that shaped human evolution, scientists must first piece together the details of the ancient plant and animal communities that our fossil ancestors lived in over the past 7 million years. Because putting together the puzzle of millions-of-years-old ecosystems is a difficult task, many studies have reconstructed the environments by drawing […]

Fossils of a new genus and species of an ankylosaurid dinosaur—Akainacephalus johnsoni—have been unearthed in the Kaiparowits Formation of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), and are revealing new details about the diversity and evolution of this group of armored dinosaurs.  Expected to look like other North American Late Cretaceous ankylosaurid dinosaurs with smooth bony armor […]

A remarkable new fossilized skeleton of a tyrannosaur discovered in the Bureau of Land Management’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah was airlifted by helicopter Sunday, Oct. 15, from a remote field site, and delivered to the Natural History Museum of Utah where it will be uncovered, prepared and studied. The fossil is […]

Many mammals and birds are remarkable athletes; mice work hard to dig burrows for protection and sparrows fight gravity with each flap of their wings. In order to have the energy to sustain vigorous exercise, the body’s tissues need a steady supply of oxygen, and red blood cells (RBCs) are the center of the oxygen […]

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, a series of Siberian volcanoes erupted and sent the Earth into the greatest mass extinction of all time. As a result of this mass extinction, known as the Permo-Triassic Mass Extinction, billions of tons of carbon were propelled into the atmosphere, radically altering the Earth’s climate. Yet, some […]

A new study by a team of scientists from Argentina, Brazil, California and the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah has determined that the time elapsed between the emergence of early dinosaur relatives and the origin of the first dinosaurs is much shorter than previously believed. The discovery not only places […]

This month the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah will launch a new digital program called Research Quest that will give middle school students across the state of Utah the chance to explore some of the museum’s paleontology collections through in-depth, classroom-based investigations. After two years of prototyping the program with […]

For more than 30 million years after dinosaurs first appeared, they remained inexplicably rare near the equator, where only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs eked out a living. The age-long absence of big plant-eaters at low latitudes is one of the great, unanswered questions about the rise of the dinosaurs. And now the mystery has […]