Top 10 Sea Reptiles
	Nowadays, the seas belong mainly to fish and sea mammals. But during the Mesozoic time, the sea was a reptilian realm. There are very few reptiles living in the sea now compared to the times of the dinosaurs. 1.Today, there are seven species of sea turtles. They appeared during the Jurassic period (200-150 Ma ago), thus they lived most of their evolutionary time together with the dinosaurs. The largest living chelonian is ... [read more >>]
	21 April 2008, 11:26GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Top 7 Mammal-Like Reptiles
	Mammals evolved from reptiles, that's for sure. Primitive living mammals, the monotremes (platypus and spiny anteaters) clearly show this, via many traits, like egg-laying, bones, and... even their penises. But the reptiles from which mammals evolved no longer exist. In fact, if birds evolved from dinosaurs, the reptiles from which the mammals evolved disappeared even before them. In fact, they ruled the Earth before the ... [read more >>]
	19 April 2008, 06:39GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

A Story of Walking on Two Feet
	Bipedalism is a term coming from "walking on two feet" in Latin. Humans are practically the only bipedal mammals. Kangaroos and many rodent species hop on two feet but they cannot walk. When walking, they do it on all four. Other species, like apes, monkeys and bears, may attempt walking on two feet, but they do it only for short distances. Their anatomy is not adapted for this. Instead, all birds are bipedal. In fact, walkin ... [read more >>]
	17 April 2008, 08:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Fastest Evolving Animal: Tuatara
	The tuatara is by far the oldest reptile inhabiting the planet, a living fossil that survived isolated in the New Zealand, protected from competition and predation of other animal groups. Surprisingly, a DNA analysis published in the journal "Trends in Genetics," carried out by a team led by evolutionary biologist and ancient DNA expert Professor David Lambert at the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution, has c ... [read more >>]
	21 March 2008, 05:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Largest Reptile Sea Monster Ever: 15 m (50 ft) Long!
	This seems to be the most extraordinary reptile of the seas to have ever existed. Measuring 15 m (50 ft) in length (as much as a humpback whale) and possessing teeth the size of cucumbers, the giant marine reptile lived 150 million years ago and it was first encountered in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located just 800 mi (1,300 km) from the North Pole, by a team led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway. In th ... [read more >>]
	28 February 2008, 02:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Tiny Pterosaurs, a Missing Link
	Besides birds and bats, the only true flying vertebrates ever were a group of reptiles contemporaneous to dinosaurs, called pterosaurs. They were the first flying vertebrates (appeared 215 million years ago) that had wings make of skin similar to those of bats, but sustained only by one finger. Pterosaurs had the body covered by hair. In time, they evolved in many shapes and sizes, but they were gone at the same time with the din ... [read more >>]
	12 February 2008, 02:46GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

12 Dinosaur Facts and Records
	1.The name "dinosaur" comes from Old Greek "deinos" ("terrible") and "saurus" ("lizard"), and was advanced by Richard Owen in 1841. The dinosaurs emerged at the end of the Triassic, about 225 million years ago, from a group of reptiles called Archosauria. Archosauria was a sister group to lizards and they gave birth both to dinosaurs and crocodiles. Eryhtrosuchus was a typical archosaur ... [read more >>]
	14 January 2008, 17:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Top 7 Snake Killers
	1.It's hard to imagine that such a slow and weak animal like a hedgehog can kill a viper. A viper attack is a blind attack and a retreat. But against this attack, the hedgehog opposes an armor of spines. The hedgehog irritates the viper continuously and each attack on the armor of spines further wounds the viper. When the viper is so badly wounded that it cannot longer attack, the hedgehog approaches biting the snake from its neck sev ... [read more >>]
	05 January 2008, 07:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Giant Fossil Sea Monster Found in the Arctic: 13 m (40 ft) Long!
	Ancient seas were dominated by huge monstrous reptiles, like plesiosaurs, marine reptile with flipper like members, similar to those found in modern marine turtles, but with very long necks, quite similar to the monster from the stories about the seasnake. They disappeared because of the same event that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. New remains of a bus-sized prehistoric huge plesiosaur found on the remote Arctic Svalbard isla ... [read more >>]
	06 December 2007, 05:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

14 Amazing Facts About Crocodiles
	1. The largest crocodile species is saltwater crocodile (Crocodylus porosus), encountered from India to northern Australia and Fiji. In can reach 7 m (23 ft) in length and 1 tonne in weight! At 5 m (17 ft) length, it already has 0.5 tonne! Even so, a crocodile egg is no larger than that of a goose! The smallest crocodile is the dwarf crocodile (Osteolaemus tetraspis) from central Africa, which has a maximum length of 1.9 m (6.5 ft). ... [read more >>]
	03 November 2007, 08:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Footprints Ever
	290 million years ago we couldn’t speak of ‘crime scene’, but researchers managed to correlate preserved trackways of that age to two species of reptile-like ancient amphibians. Fossils of Diadectes absitus and Orobates pabsti were recently discovered in the Tambach Formation in central Germany. Close to the fossils and in a similar sediment layer, the researchers discovered well-preserved footprints that matched the fossils, ... [read more >>]
	13 September 2007, 06:13GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Oldest Modern Ears
	The ear of a fish does not capture the sounds in the air and the first backboned species that conquered the land were largely deaf, lacking the tiny bones that transmitted the airborne sounds to the inner ear. Evolved hearing was believed to have evolved just before the emergence of dinosaurs, about 200 million years ago. Now, a team has discovered that weasel-sized prehistoric reptiles from Russia belonging to a group called Pararepti ... [read more >>]
	12 September 2007, 06:13GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

An Ancient Long-Necked Flying Dragon
	Flying dragons were on fashion even before the advent of the dinosaurs. Paleontologists have just described a unique type of a new long-necked, gliding reptile found in 220 million-year old (Triassic era) sediments of eastern North America, in a time when dinosaurs were in the cradle. Mecistotrachelos apeoros (meaning "soaring, long-necked") which has been described is based on two fossils excavated at the Solite ... [read more >>]
	12 June 2007, 04:50GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia