When it comes to animals with iconic features, the turtle is high on the list. Deer have horns, kangaroos have pouches, humans have existential dread, and turtles have shells... right? Apparently that ...

Through careful study of an ancient ancestor of modern turtles, researchers now have a clearer picture of how the turtles' most unusual shell came to be. The findings help to fill a 30- to ...

Turtle shells evolved over the course of 300 million years, but self-defense wasn't the initial driver, researchers think.

If you ask most people to guess why turtles first developed shells, you’ll usually get one answer: the hard shells protect them from predators. That’s the theory scientists have been working with for ...

Skeleton season may be just around the corner, but the skeleton age dawned with the early Cambrian Period, about 538 million to 506 million years ago. In this time span, most major animal groups ...

Imagine there are ten different types of shells, each the size of a grain of sand, mixed in the bowl of mud in front of you. You want to find each type of individual shell —what do you do? For ...

ALTHOUGH Wells 1 and Scrutton 2 suggested methods of studying fossils to determine probable changes in day length, few studies have followed these suggestions. We have examined fossil bivalve shells ...

A collection of fossil shells from marine snails and clams is challenging a theory that says the world's deadliest mass extinction was accompanied by severe ocean acidification. The study is the first ...

Scientists have identified a mineral signature for sites that are more likely to contain rare fossils that preserve evidence of soft tissue — essential information to understanding ancient life. Much ...