A modern-day walking bat in New Zealand did not evolve its unusual habit, but instead retained it from an ancestor, a new fossil found in Australia shows.

Two spiders sported adaptations that helped them survive the brutal beginnings of earthly life, new 3-D imaging shows.

New analysis of a well-preserved pterosaur fossil has revealed that the creature had uniquely complex wing membranes and a covering of fibers quite different from modern mammal hair.

Using aerial pictures of crop fields near Venice, researchers have made a detailed map of the buried Roman port of Altinum, revealing the remains of city walls, a network of streets and canals, homes, and even monuments such as an amphitheater and a basilica.

Using aerial pictures of crop markings, scientists are painting a first detailed picture of the buried Roman city of Altinum, which some scholars think helped give rise to nearby Venice.

Naked, beheaded, and tangled, the bodies of 51 young men—their heads stacked neatly to the side—have been found in a thousand-year-old pit in England.

Vast amounts of a mineral that doesn't form in seawater surround some of the earliest known animal fossils, suggesting that complex life arose in salty, alkaline lakes.

Like a Paleolithic edition of CSI, scientists wounded pig carcasses to replicate a Neanderthal man's death and found that a weapon used only by modern humans likely inflicted the fatal blow.

Pygmy mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and some of the earliest Americans may have been killed off by climate change sparked by a cosmic bombardment 12,900 years ago, a new study suggests.

Don't let the foot-long claws fool you. Unlike the X-men's most popular pugilist, this newfound dinosaur species was no predator, scientists say.

The discovery of the world's oldest known dinosaur burrow suggests that when the going got tough, some polar dinosaurs started digging.

Men of the ancient civilization in Mexico carried ancestral thighbones as status symbols, new grave excavations suggest.

Many of the 33 mummies uncovered near Chiclayo, Peru, were those of girls—a rarity, experts say. Their throats slit, the girls were probably killed in a bid for agricultural fertility. Video.

A richly decorated canine skeleton and unbroken plaster seals add to clues that a site at the heart of Mexico City could be the only known—and unlooted—tomb of an Aztec king.

Although they start out looking like chickens and mice, baby turtles go through a unique folding process inside their eggs that forms their upper shells, a new study shows.