The area surrounding what is now Wuda, Inner Mongolia, once teemed with tropical plants before a tremendous ancient volcanic explosion overwhelmed it. The ash-entombed forest, buried between coal layers, left such remarkably preserved fossilized plants that artists and paleontologists have been able to reconstruct the former wet-forest landscape.

Howell Thomas, senior paleontological preparator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was skeptical when a woman claimed that she found a fossilized whale brain in San Luis Obispo County, California, nine years ago.

The evolutionary history of certain extinct marine reptiles just got rewritten.

Many butterflies and moths have colors that show a metallic sheen. That sheen occurs because the refracting material in their wings and bodies is spread out in layers precisely as thin as the wavelengths of the light they refract.

Workers expanding a highway in 2010 found fossils of 80 huge whales in desert sandstones in Chile, prompting questions of how they died and why they were so well preserved.