paleontology

Decades before paleontology’s formal establishment, Black and Native Americans discovered—and correctly identified—millennia-old fossils.

As two warring bone hunters sought to destroy each other, they laid the foundations for our knowledge of dinosaurs.

In a forbidding Wyoming desert, scientists and fortune hunters search for the surprisingly intact remains of horses and other creatures that lived long ago.

Why Barnum Brown could not stop collecting.

In Hell Creek, Montana, with a lot of dynamite.

In 19th-century America, rare old bones were a resource like any other.

For well over a hundred years, paleontology has done double duty as mass entertainment.

How geology shaped American culture.

Beware of theories about human nature based on the study of our earliest ancestors.

Dan Flores reminds us that modern North Americans still walk in the footsteps of our fellow animals.

Archaeology and genetics can’t yet agree on when humans first arrived in the Americas. That’s good science, and here’s why.

A pile of mammoth bones offers evidence that people were living in the region as early as 37,000 years ago.

A Black cowboy named George McJunkin found a site that would transform views about the history of Native Americans in North America.

Museums construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.

You can hone in on a specific location and visualize how it has evolved between the Cryogenian Period and the present.

Fossil Cycad National Monument held America's richest deposit of petrified cycadeoid plants, until it didn't.

The exhibition “Mermaids and Monsters” explores hoaxes of yore.

For centuries, the infamous Boss Tweed was blamed for destroying its dino-models—but what really happened is even weirder.

An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains.