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Sep 24 2010 - 6:00pm

Evidence shows that life probably began in the ocean at least 3.5 billion years ago. Photosynthesis began more than 2.5 billion years ago—the Great Oxidation Event. But it took hundreds of millions of years for enough oxygen to build up in the atmosp ... ...

Sep 20 2011 - 3:30pm

On a beach in Piña, Panama the tide is rolling out. Faint outlines of skeletal remains rise above the sand. Smithsonian scientists Nicholas Pyenson and Aaron O'Dea along with a team of students descend upon the beach. Their mission: to excavate the ... ...

Jun 22 2011 - 5:47pm

Fossils Get a CT Scan After a few long days of hard work on the island, we were finally able to excavate and remove ,  not just one, but two skeletons of an early "toothe ... ...

May 21 2012 - 1:23pm

Video of the Palauan primitive cave eel (Protanguilla palau) Palauan primitive cave eel (Protanguilla palau), a 'living fossil' ... ...

Aug 17 2011 - 12:09pm

How long have jellyfish lived in the ocean? This jellyfish fossil is from the Cambrian period, more than 500 million years ago. It was found buried in Utah —an area that used ... ...

Apr 12 2013 - 11:29am

This early whale was well suited to life at sea. But it also lived on land. An ancestor of the right whale ,  Maiacetus  lived 49-40 million years ago. It had flipper-like l ... ...

Aug 21 2012 - 8:51am

Where ocean currents were strong, ancient rudist “recliners” lay unattached on the seabed. Notice the pink tentacles, which were used to filter feed. Learn more about ocean l ... ...

Aug 9 2012 - 10:27am

Great White Sharks are stealthy hunters and the secret is in their skin. Shark skin is covered by tiny flat V-shaped scales, called dermal denticals, that are more like teeth than fi ... ...

May 29 2012 - 11:42am

Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, holds an arm bone from a "toothed" mysticete from Vancouver ... ...

May 11 2012 - 11:46am

Monodontids, the group of whales that includes living belugas and narwhals, are emblematic symbols of the Arctic. However, the fossil record shows that these animals had a much large ... ...

Mar 8 2012 - 12:30pm

This rendering shows life at the end of the Cretaceous Period, before the impact of a 6.2 mi (10 km) asteroid triggered mass extinctions on land and sea. Dinosaurs are the mo ... ...

Sep 21 2011 - 9:53am

The Galápagos Islands site in Ecuador was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1978. Located in the equatorial Pacific Ocean nearly 1000 km from South America, the Galapagos Islan ... ...

Nov 4 2010 - 1:41pm

Dr. Stephen Cairns is a research zoologist and chair of the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His research focuses o ... ...

Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am

A scientific illustration of the most powerful fish of its time,  Carcharodon megalodon , which swam the ocean 30 million years ago.  This shark may have reached a size of 20 meter ... ...

Jan 26 2010 - 11:45am