People have always known of dinosaurs, though they have called them by many names. Old legends that place Western dragons in caves or beneath the earth may have originated with fossils.…

Just outside Dawson City in northwest Canada, an unmarked gravel road branches from the main highway and snakes along Bonanza Creek—so named by the fortunes that were discovered…

Every winter for the past decade, paleontologist Kenneth D. Rose returns to Vastan, one of the open-pit lignite (“brown coal”) mines in a corner of western India. On this dizzyingly…

Just before the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima, the land below appears smooth as glass. The bomb falls on a grid of streets aligned between lazy rivers. In footage from 1945, the city’s…

Not all of the more than 128 million specimens and artifacts that Kirk Johnson oversees as director of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History can be seen or touched. For…

Organic life beneath the shoreless wavesWas born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly cavesFirst forms minute, unseen by spheric glassMove on the mud, or pierce the watery massThese, as…

“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter Alvarez Built upon the slopes of Mount…

In his essay, “In Search of the First Human Home,” in this issue of Nautilus, Ian Tattersall calls humans’ modern notion of home “revolutionary.” In our video interview (above),…

Karen Chin doesn’t have all the answers, but she is willing to make those awkward phone calls that will give her the information she needs. There was the time back in 1998 when she…

In 1858, a collection of large bones was found in a field in southeastern New Jersey. Today the site is lost within the unremarkable sprawl of suburban residences, and there is an…