A whale-size ichthyosaur can be seen swimming in a shallow lagoon 200 million years ago alongside other marine creatures in this illustration.
Jeannette Rüegg/Heinz Furrer/University of Zurich
Tupandactylus ? Nicholls 2022: Artist's reconstruction of the feathered pterosaur Tupandactylus, showing the feather types along the bottom of the headcrest: dark monofilaments and lighter-coloured branched feathers.
Bob Nicholls
Courtesy of Izzy Wisher
More than a century after it sank off the coast of Antarctica, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton's ship HMS Endurance has been found. The ship, which sank in 1915, is 3,008 meters (1.9 miles or 9,842 feet) deep in the Weddell Sea, a pocket in the Southern Ocean along the northern coast of Antarctica, south of the Falkland Islands.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic
Bigger than a T. rex, Spinosaurus swam and hunted its prey underwater, one of only a handful of known aquatic dinosaurs.
An artificial lake off the west coast of Sicily was once one of the largest sacred pools in the ancient Mediterranean 2,500 years ago -- and it was aligned with the stars, according to research published in March.
Sapienza University of Rome Expedition to Motya
Giant ground sloths the size of a car are among many ice age animals immortalized in an 8-mile-long frieze of rock paintings at Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon rainforest -- art created by some of the earliest humans to live in the region, according to a study published in March.
LASTJOURNEY Project
A spectacular three-dimensional fossil of a winged reptile known as pterosaur has been discovered on the shore of the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland.
University of Edinburgh
A tooth unearthed at Grotte Mandrin in France has revealed that early modern humans lived there some 54,000 years ago, upending what we know about early humans and Neanderthals.
Ludovic Slimak
A large area of well-preserved Roman mosaic -- parts of it approximately 1,800 years old -- has been uncovered in London near one of the city's most popular landmarks.
Andy Chopping/MOLA
Eophylica priscatellata is one of two flowers discovered perfectly preserved in amber. They bloomed at the feet of dinosaurs and show that some flowering plants have remained unchanged for 99 million years.
DNA analysis of skeletons buried at Umm el-Marra, Syria, revealed that during Bronze Age, people created the earliest hybrid animal -- a majestic horselike creature known as a kunga. It had a donkey mom, a Syrian wild ass for a father and lived 4,500 years ago.
Katherine Kanne, a researcher from the University of Exeter, measures a horse's jaw bone. Medieval horses were in fact pony-size -- much smaller than their modern descendents, according to the largest-ever study of horse bones.
