Paleontology news through a Lowcountry lens — what new discoveries mean for South Carolina fossils and the people who hunt them.
New fossil evidence suggests hatchling Tyrannosaurus rex were tiny but already lethal hunters. Here's why that ontogeny question matters even in fossil-rich South Carolina, where growth stories are written in shark teeth.
Aug 7, 2026
A newly described deep-sea whale necropolis along the Indian Ocean's Diamantina Zone shows how whale carcasses become fossils — a process that helps explain the whale bone Lowcountry collectors pull from Charleston's Oligocene ledges.
Aug 5, 2026
A tiny, exquisitely preserved Cretaceous snake from Brazil reopens the century-old debate over whether snakes first lost their limbs in water, in leaf litter, or underground — and it reminds us why articulated skeletons are so rare in the Lowcountry.
Aug 5, 2026
Record-low water on the Danube in Bulgaria exposed the associated bones of a young woolly mammoth. For South Carolina collectors, the story is a familiar one — low water, exposed sediment, and Ice Age giants coming to light.
Aug 3, 2026
A new genomic study of 500-plus mammoth bones finds that Ice Age bone piles are dominated by females, hinting at human hunting behavior. Here's how it connects to the mammoths that turn up in Lowcountry rivers.
Aug 3, 2026
An Australian ichthyosaur nicknamed "BOB" preserves a pterosaur in its gut and giant pliosaur bite marks on its bones — a rare frozen food chain. Here's how the same detective work plays out in South Carolina's fossil record.
Aug 3, 2026
A new Australian study decodes the chemical and biological signatures underwater environments leave on bones—and there are real lessons for anyone reading fossils out of South Carolina's blackwater rivers.
Jul 28, 2026
A new Nature Reviews Biodiversity synthesis retraces how whales went from riverbank mammals to ocean apex predators. Here's how South Carolina's Oligocene beds fit into that story.
Jul 28, 2026
A beachcomber's frozen stash of southern right whale scat just rewrote what we know about baleen whale diets — and it echoes the deep-time whale story preserved in Charleston's Oligocene rock.
Jul 16, 2026
A newly named mosasaur from Texas, Tylosaurus rex, stretched some 43 feet and bore rare serrated teeth. Here is what this Cretaceous giant means for how we read South Carolina's own marine reptile record.
Jul 5, 2026
A new life-size skeleton of the dinosaur-eating crocodilian Deinosuchus schwimmeri has gone on display in Georgia. Here's what this Late Cretaceous apex predator tells us about the ancient Southeast — and how it connects to South Carolina's fossil story.
Jul 5, 2026
A superbly preserved fossil tarpon from New Zealand sat unnamed for decades until a late collector's donated field notebooks supplied the missing locality data. The story is a sharp lesson for Lowcountry fossil hunters.
Jul 5, 2026