An article published in the journal “Nature” describes the study of traces left by organisms that lived over half a billion years ago that could be important to understand how animals evolved. A team of researchers discovered fossil traces of tracks and burrows left by some of the first organisms capable of active movements. Those creatures were very small, with a thickness comparable to that of a hair that could range from 40 to 300 micrometres, but among them there could be the ancestors of most animals.

An article published in the journal “Biology Letters” describes a research on Chilesaurus diegosuarezi, a dinosaur that caused perplexity among paleontologists because it looked like a T.rex’s vegetarian cousin and had other characteristics that made it a kind of jigsaw puzzle of various species. According to Matthew Baron and Paul M. Barrett this dinosaur that lived in today’s Chile about 145 million years ago is a missing link that shows how carnivorous theropods have evolved into herbivorous long-necked ornithischians.

An article published in the magazine “Scientific Reports” describes a research on a feathered dinosaur that shows not the usual generic similarities to birds but a remarkable resemblance to the cassowary with a crest on its head and long legs. A team of paleontologists led by Lü Junchang called it Corythoraptor jacobsi and it was a dinosaur belonging to the oviraptorid family that lived in the late Cretaceous, between 100 and 66 million years ago, in today’s southern China.