An extinct genus of ray-finned fish that lived during the Jurassic period seems to have had quite the penchant for overreaching.

A new analysis of fossilized Tharsis fish reveals that the carnivorous marine animals seem to have frequently met their end with large cephalopods known as belemnites lodged quite fatally in their gullets.

According to paleontologists Martin Ebert and Martina Kölbl-Ebert of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, Tharsis fish found in the 152 million-year-old Solnhofen Plattenkalk (limestone) formation in Germany appear in multiple instances to have died while attempting to swallow a belemnite nearly as long as themselves.

Australian tree frogs today make up over one third of all known frog species on the continent. Among this group, iconic species such as the green tree frog (Litoria caerulea) and the green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea), are both beloved for their vivid colours and distinctive calls.

In the Early Eocene epoch, 55 million years ago, Australia’s tree frogs were hopping across the Australian continent from one billabong to the next through a forested corridor that also extended back across Antarctica to South America. These were the last remnants of ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

In new research published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, we identify Australia’s earliest known species of tree frog – one that once hopped and croaked around an ancient lake near the town of Murgon in south-eastern Queensland.

This research demonstrates tree frogs were present in Australia 30 million years earlier than previously thought, living alongside Australia’s earliest known snakes, songbirds and marsupials.

A Denver museum known for its dinosaur displays has made a fossil bone discovery closer to home than anyone ever expected, under its own parking lot.

It came from a hole drilled more than 750 feet (230 meters) deep to study geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The museum is popular with dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Full-size dinosaur skeletons amaze kiddos barely knee-high to a parent, much less to a Tyrannosaurus.

This latest find is not so visually impressive. Even so, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped fossil sample were impressively small.

With a bore only a couple of inches (5 centimeters) wide, museum officials struggled to describe just how unlikely it was to hit a dinosaur, even in a region with a fair number of such fossils.

As herbivores, these animals had large teeth for grinding their diet of plants.

“These mammals can have enamel two to three millimeters thick. It was a lot of material to work with,” Dr. Green said.

“What we found — peptide fragments, chains of amino acids, that together form proteins as old as 18 million years — was field-changing.”

“Nobody’s ever found peptide fragments that are this old before.”

Until now, the oldest published materials are about 3.5 million years old.

Ankylosaurids (family Ankylosauridae) were herbivorous quadruped dinosaurs known for their robust, scute-covered bodies, distinctive body armor, leaf-shaped teeth, and club-like tails.

The earliest-known ankylosaurids date to around 122 million years ago, and the youngest species went extinct 66 million years ago during the end-Cretaceous extinction.

The newly-identified species belongs to a previously monospecific ankylosaurid genus called Zhongyuansaurus.

Named Zhongyuansaurus junchangi, it lived in what is now China during the Albian age of the latest Early Cretaceous.

The dinosaur’s fossilized remains were collected from the upper part of the Haoling Formation at Zhongwa village in Henan province, China.

Squids first appeared about 100 million years ago and quickly rose to become dominant predators in the ancient oceans, according to a study published in the journal Science.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University developed an advanced fossil discovery technique that completely digitizes rocks with all embedded fossils in complete 3D form. It allowed them to identify one thousand fossilized cephalopod beaks hidden inside Late Cretaceous rocks from Japan. Among these small and fragile beaks were 263 squid specimens, including about 40 different species that had never been seen before.

The so-called Cambrian explosion is commonly labeled as the time in Earth’s history when animal body plans suddenly appear.

Most studies suggest that this event occurred between 541 million and 530 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian period.

“The Cambrian explosion is a unique period in the history of life that poses many unanswered questions,” said Dr. Olmo Miguez Salas from the Universitat Barcelona and Dr. Zekun Wang of the Natural History Museum, London.

Paleontologists studying rocks from Morocco have unearthed the most exquisitely preserved trilobite fossils yet discovered. The new lifelike fossils update our understanding of the evolution and biology of these extinct ocean-dwelling arthropods.

The details are so great that soft tissue parts of the trilobites, including the mouth and digestive tract, are clearly visible, researchers report June 27 in Science. Such parts are typically lost as the animals turn into fossils.

“These trilobite fossils represent the most complete specimens found to date, not only preserving the hard exoskeleton but also the soft parts in 3-D, such as the antennae, walking legs and the digestive system,” says paleontologist John Paterson of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

A partial skeleton found in the Fernie Formation in British Columbia, Canada, back in 1916 represents a new genus and species of an extinct marine reptile called ichthyosaur, according to an international team of paleontologists.

Fernatator prenticei lived in North America during the Early Jurassic epoch, around 190 million years ago.

“Ichthyosaurs — marine reptiles superficially resembling dolphins — were important marine predators from the Early Triassic (Olenekian) to the beginning of the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian),” said Professor Judy Massare of SUNY College at Brockport and colleagues.

“They were the dominant large predators in the Triassic and Early Jurassic oceans.”

“Thousands of partial and complete skeletons of Early Jurassic ichthyosaurs have been collected, mainly from the UK and Germany.”

“Early Jurassic ichthyosaurs from North America are rare,” they noted.

“Thus, the discovery of a partial skeleton from western Canada is significant.”

A labrador-sized dinosaur was wrongly categorised when it was found and is actually a new species, scientists have discovered.

Its new name is Enigmacursor - meaning puzzling runner - and it lived about 150 million years ago, running around the feet of famous giants like the Stegosaurus.

It was originally classified as a Nanosaurus but scientists now conclude it is a different animal.

Enigmacursor is tiny by comparison. At 64 cm tall and 180 cm long it is about the height of a labrador, but with much bigger feet and a tail that was "probably longer than the rest of the dinosaur," says Professor Susannah Maidment.

An interesting look around the La Brea Tar Pits, including some behind the scenes of the facilities where they handle the recovered fossils.