Scientists have found new evidence for how our fossil human relatives in South Africa may have used their hands. Research led by Samar Syeda, postdoctoral researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, together with scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, the University of the Witwatersrand, University of Kent, Duke University and the National Geographic Society, investigated variation in finger bone morphology to determine that South African hominins not only may have had different levels of dexterity, but also different climbing abilities.

New poison dart frog discovered in the Amazon's Juruá River basin is blue with copper-colored legs, and represents one of just two novel Ranitomeya species in a decade

The origin of reptiles on Earth has been shown to be up to 40 million years earlier than previously thought – thanks to evidence discovered at an Australian fossil site that represents a critical time period.

Flinders University Professor John Long and colleagues have identified fossilised tracks of an amniote with clawed feet – most probably a reptile – from the Carboniferous period, about 350 million years ago.

New discoveries of fossil clawed footprints from Australia, published this week in Nature, push the origin of reptiles back in time by at least 35 million years and change the entire timeline for the origin of tetrapods (backboned land animals).