Paleontology news through a Lowcountry lens — what new discoveries mean for South Carolina fossils and the people who hunt them.
A single rodent tooth from a Chilean marine deposit is rewriting the Atacama's deep history — and it's a useful reminder of why Lowcountry fossil beds mix whales, sharks, and Ice Age land animals.
Oct 28, 2026
A Yale team used machine learning and 11,000-plus fossil measurements to argue Spinosaurus spent most of its life submerged — and the same tools that cracked that case speak directly to the secondarily aquatic whales buried in our Lowcountry marls.
Oct 27, 2026
Rediscovered megalodon vertebrae from Denmark suggest the giant shark reached about 80 feet and may have lived for nearly a century. Here's what that means for the teeth South Carolina's rivers produce.
Oct 20, 2026
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