Would intelligence and civilization have evolved if dinosaurs had continued to dominate the planet? Maybe not.

Just how many times was the New World discovered? At least seven times. Maybe more.

66 million years ago, at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, mosasaurs ruled the seas. And one mosasaur ruled all the others.

What are the fossils of a small plesiosaur- a “marine reptile”- doing in a Cretaceous river system? Maybe they lived there.

A study of our past suggests some surprising things about our future. We’ll likely to live longer, become taller, and more lightly built. We may become more attractive. We’ll be less aggressive, and more agreeable, but with smaller brains. Imagine a species of tall, willowy, long-lived supermodels. We’ll be beautiful, but with the personality of a Golden Retriever- friendly, maybe not that bright.

A handful of broken vertebrae hint at a new, large species raptor that prowled England during the Early Cretaceous.

Tetrapodophis is snek.

It wasn’t necessarily inevitable that fire, or spearpoints, axes, ornament or bows would be discovered when they were. Then, as now, one person could literally change the course of history, with nothing more than an idea.

Sierraceratops, a new horned dinosaur from the Southwest, fits a familiar pattern- different dinosaurs in different parts of the North American continent. Why do we find this?

Snakes originated in the time of the dinosaurs, but fossils of dinosaur-era snakes suggest they were distantly related to living snakes. An evolutionary tree of modern snakes, reconstructed using DNA, suggests that only a handful of species survived the end-Cretaceous mass extinction- and underwent an explosive diversification in the aftermath.

Homo sapiens uses an incredible range of chemicals to alter our minds. When and how did this peculiar habit develop?

Our DNA suggests modern humans evolved around 250,000 years ago, but Homo sapiens fossils known from this time are far from modern. They had big brow ridges, long skulls, and broad jaws like Neanderthals. But while they looked primitive, these people were our contemporaries, not our ancestors. Who were they- and why did we replace them?

At the start of the Jurassic, 200 million years ago, Pangaea starts to break up. By 90 MYA, when duckbills evolved in North America, the breakup was finished- and Africa was isolated from the rest of the world by oceans. By the time duckbills appeared, there was no way for them to get to Africa. Yet they did.

The javelin was a simple but deadly weapon that helped determine the outcome of battles- and therefore shape history- for hundreds of thousands of years. Perhaps no other weapon has played a larger role in our history.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

A bit of beak- long and skinny, flattened top to bottom, shaped not like a pterosaur, but the beak of a kiwi bird- a bird that uses its long, skinny beak to probe in the dirt for worms.