Researchers reveal that a 1.2 million-year-old female pelvis they found in Ethiopia in 2001 suggests our predecessors were larger-brained than previously thought

The story of evolution got bigger last week when researchers revealed in the journal Science that they had discovered a wide-hipped pelvis, suggesting our ancestors were larger-brained than formerly thought. The first of its kind, the 1.2 million-year-old, near-complete female pelvis is from the now-extinct Homo erectus species, believed to be our first human-like relative to leave Africa.

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About 190 million years ago, during the Early Jurassic Period, a vast desert larger than the Sahara covered much of what is now Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. Given that Jurassic time was the "Age of Dinosaurs," it's not surprising that fossil evidence of the great reptiles would show up there now and then. But recently, geologists from the University of Utah uncovered an exceptional find -- a large concentration of dinosaur tracks and rare tail-drag marks.

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In an auction battle between two odd items yesterday at Bonhams New York, a few fossilized pieces of 130-million-year-old dinosaur dung sold for nearly one thousand dollars, but a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite didn't find any takers.

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Standing two to three feet tall on legs adapted to wade through shallow water, the 48-million-year-old Indohyus is the missing link between modern-day whales and their land-lubbing ancestors.

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A team of paleontologists led by Joern Hurum of the University of Oslos Natural History Museum last year excavated the skeleton of an enormous 150-million-year-old pliosaur; after months of piecing bones together, they now are confident it is largest of its kind ever discovered. Typical pliosaurs—tear-shaped swimmers with short necks—were about 20 feet long, but the paleontologists guess that this monster stretched to some 50 feet in length.

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