Beneath ordinary ground, discoveries still wait that quietly redraw assumptions about life long before humans paid attention. Fossils tend to arrive in fragments, then patterns start forming, and ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Modern anacondas and pythons are massive, but fossil evidence shows they are not even close to the largest snakes to ever exist.

Beneath the surface of a Colombian coal mine, scientists made a discovery so extraordinary that it rewrote what we know about giant reptiles. In 2009, researchers unearthed fossil remains of an ...

Pythons and anacondas are undeniably massive snakes, capable of reaching lengths and girths that make them some of the heaviest reptiles alive today. But even these modern giants pale in comparison to ...

Carlos Jaramillo (top row, third from the right), a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, co-organized the team that discovered the largest snake in world history. Courtesy ...

A fossil find in Argentina has revealed a two-legged creature that's the most primitive snake known, a discovery that promises to fire up the scientific debate about whether snakes evolved on land or ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

NEW YORK — Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern ...

The Isle of Skye holds the key to ancient species. From the Elgol dinosaur to the Krusatodon or the world’s largest pterosaur fossil from the Jurassic period, fossils found here have shaped our ...