Laying eggs led to the dinosaurs' downfall after ruling the Earth for 150 million years, a study suggests.

A giant penguin more than 4ft (1.2m) tall roamed New Zealand about 27 million years ago, according to paleontologists who have reconstructed it from fossil remains.

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years.

There was more than a ripple of excitement in the scientific community yesterday as news spread that a reindeer herder in an isolated part of northern Siberia had found a perfectly preserved, fossilised woolly mammoth calf.

Aptly enough in environment questions, we had a sighting of a creature thought extinct. It was Gordon Brown. For those with eyes to see, it was clear that he had come to make a statement. And the statement was: I am not extinct.

In the War Office there were a lot of old fossils. But the one who was the real fossil was Claud William Wright. He was not only a senior administrative civil servant, and when transferred to the Ministry of Education the first Permanent Secretary, in effect, to Lord Eccles' Ministry of the Arts under Margaret Thatcher, but also from an early age, a leading geologist, palaeontologist and archaeologist.

Scientists have unearthed the fossilised bones of a meat-eating dinosaur the size of a large dog which they said could fill in the gaps about the early evolution and global migration of a group of animals that dominated the land for 170 million years.

A new species of pterosaurs which had a wingspan the size of a family car has been uncovered by scientists.

For sale: one dinosaur, 24ft long, 65 million years old, only the second fossil of this grandeur ever to go under the auctioneer's hammer.