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Around 120m years ago, as the dinosaurs neared the climax of their dominion, high above their heads an extraordinary creature flitted from tree to tree. The bizarre lizard, named the "flying dragon" by its Chinese discoverers, glided using a flap of skin spread over eight ribs.
The find is remarkable because almost all gliding species, such as "flying" frogs and squirrels, use a membrane spread between their toes or between their body and legs to generate lift. Only two other species evolved the rib-gliding tactic. Xianglong zhaoi is also the first lizard fossil with gliding ribs to be found.

Li Pipeng and colleagues at the Shenyang Normal University in north-eastern China say: "Gliding is an energetically efficient mode of locomotion that has evolved independently, and in different ways, in several tetrapod groups."

The fossil lizard, which was found in Liaoning, north-eastern China, is 15.5cm (6in) long, including a 9.5cm tail. But its strangest feature is eight elongated ribs around 4cm long, covered in a skin flap. The fossil's extraordinary preservation meant scientists could see details of the flap as well as the bones.

Giant tooth found in wreck of paleontologist's home Found in debris following hurricane Ike, tooth is thought to be that of a Columbian mammoth from 10,000 years ago

A giant tooth was found by two paleontologists in the wreckage of a Texan home destroyed by Hurricane Ike.

Dorothy Sisk, a scientist at Lamar University, had returned to her beachfront home in Caplen, on the Bolivar Peninsula, with her colleague Jim Westgate to assess the damage following the hurricane when they found the football-sized fossil tooth amid the debris.

Westgate, who is a paleontologist and research associate at the University of Texas Memorial Museum, said they were looking through the scraps of concrete and splintered pilings in the front garden when he saw the tooth.

"It was while we were looking at the house, or at least what was left of the foundation, that I saw it lying there with lots of shell debris in what had been the front yard,'' he said.

The six-pound tooth is said to resemble slices of bread stuck together.
''This is the first one I've found in 19 years,'' he said. ''People bring in pieces and parts off the beach for me to identify, and I haven't seen one in this good a condition.''

It is thought that the tooth probably belonged to a Columbian mammoth, which was common in North America around 10,000 years ago.

It is expected the tooth will be sent to the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.

An almost perfect 29m-year-old fossilised skull from one of humankind's earliest ancestors has been unearthed in Egypt.

The specimen is from a young female that lived in the early Oligocene, a period of global cooling, volcanic eruptions and seismic disturbance, driven by the collision of the Indian and Asian continental plates. The skull, from a species known as Aegyptopithecus zeuxis, or dawn ape, is the most complete and well-preserved known and only the second to be found.

Researchers led by the Egyptian Geological Museum in Cairo uncovered the fossilised remains in a quarry on the outskirts of the city and were able to perform detailed x-ray scans of the skull, revealing the size and shape of the brain.

The skull was half the size of the first dawn ape skull, a male found in 1966, suggesting modern apes and monkeys developed larger brains later in evolution.

Elwyn Simons, a primatologist on the team from Duke University, North Carolina, said the skull weighed about 5.5lbs (2.5kg). Measurements led the scientists to believe it was capable of forming large social troops similar to those seen in modern day primates. The shape of the eye sockets suggest the species was active during the daytime, like modern apes.

Fossils of dawn ape have been found in two quarries about half a mile apart on the Fayum depression near Cairo. While it is now arid, scientists believe it was a flourishing rain forest when they were alive.