In a remarkable evolutionary windfall, fossil hunters have discovered neatly fitting halves of a nearly complete, 3.8-million-year-old hominid skull. This unexpected specimen shines some light on ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented ...

Everything we know about the group of human ancestors called australopiths comes from just a few dozen fossils. But a skull discovered in Ethiopia is now changing anthropologists' understanding of the ...