Spiky oddball prowled ocean half billion years ago
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A spectacularly quirky creature with  long, curved spines protruding from its armored body prowled  the ocean floor half a billion years ago near the dawn of  complex life forms on Earth, scientists said.
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A dino-era graveyard of large, predatory sea reptiles has been found by fossil hunters, including the remains of an estimated 33-foot-long (10-meter-long) beast dubbed "the Monster."&#149; Arctic sea monster images >>
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Scientists have found a fossil of a "Monster" fish-like reptile in a 150 million-year-old Jurassic graveyard on an Arctic island off Norway.
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New research suggests that the Âgreat dyingÂ 251 million years ago was followed by an explosion of complexity in marine life that has persisted ever since.
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An astonishing collection of fossil animals from southern Australia is reported by scientists.
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It may be freezing cold and covered in ice now but 70 million years ago the Arctic Ocean was as tepid as the Mediterranean.
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Our heavy-browed competitors lasted 2,000 years longer than previously thought, a new cave find suggests&#151;though not everyone agrees on the dates.
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Ancient fish could bite a shark in two  Sharks were not always the top predators in the ocean.
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Scientists reconstruct part of the genetic code of a 75-million-year-old mammal ancestor.
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Scientists see a galaxy whose light would have set out some 12.8 billion years ago.
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New research suggest that the platypus diverged from its closest relatives much earlier than previously thought.
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Computer analysis of an African fossil indicates that a human-like creature walked upright six million years ago&#151;the earliest evidence of bipedalism found to date.
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Small deer-like animal that waded in lagoons 10 million years ago may have evolved into whale
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Mammals took to the skies at least 70 million years earlier than previously thought, scientists say.
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Science & environment: Fossilised skull thought to date back up to 100,000 years, a period long a mystery to scientists
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A new fossil discovery from China shows that a tiny squirrel-like creature glided through the air during the age of dinosaurs, more than 75 million years earlier than scientists had documented that ability in a mammal.
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Big evolutionary insights sometimes come in little packages. Witness the startling discovery, in a cave on the eastern Indonesian island of Flores, of the partial skeleton of a half-size Homo species that