Found on the southern coast of Peru, this amphibious creature had a tail and hooves and was the oldest preserved fossil of ...

As the whale hall at the Natural History Museum undergoes a deep clean and refresh, we take a peek behind the scenes at how our conservators have been cleaning one of the biggest specimens on display: ...

Call it an unfinished story, but with a plot that's a grabber. It's the tale of an ancient land mammal making its way back to the sea, becoming the forerunner of today's whales. In doing so, it ...

In Egypt’s Sahara Desert, massive skeletons with strange skulls and gigantic teeth jut out from the sandy ground. This fossil graveyard, millions of years old, is known as the “Valley of the ...

Whales, the ocean's largest creatures, were once land-dwelling animals that walked on four legs. Around 50 million years ago, their ancestors roamed the shores, evolving into the marine giants we ...

This story appears in the August 2010 issue of National Geographic magazine. Thirty-seven million years ago, in the waters of the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, a sinuous, 50-foot-long beast with ...

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Tagging and monitoring whales can reveal their extensive migration routes, but not how far—or whether—their ancestors roamed five million years ago. UC Berkeley researcher Larry Taylor knew ...