1997 in paleontology

Dinosaurs

 * Paleontologist Karen Chin receives a coprolite that was excavated during 1995 from strata dating back to the Maastrichtian in Saskatchewan, Canada. The specimen was about 17 inches (44 cm) long and contained fragments of bone. Due to its size, contents and age, the coprolite was believed to have been the remains of Tyrannosaurus rex feces. This discovery was announced in a 1998 paper published in the journal Nature.
 * A Saharan expedition under the leadership of Paul Sereno yields fruit when a team member stumbles on the bones and skull of Nigersaurus taqueti. During this and a subsequent 1999 expedition about 80% of the animal's skeleton were discovered. Later in the year of the second expedition, a formal description of the animal was published.
 * French paleontologist Philippe Taquet reports the finding of fossilized theropod embryos preserved in Portuguese dinosaur eggs. These eggs were from the Jurassic period dating to about 140 million years ago, nearly twice as old as any previously recovered dinosaurs embryos, which had only been known from about 70 million years ago in Late Cretaceous strata.

Newly named dinosaurs
Data courtesy of George Olshevsky's dinosaur genera list and Dr. Jeremy Montague's dinosaur genus database.

Exopaleontology

 * Richard B. Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center photographs what he believes to be microfossils in the martian Murchison meteorite.

Humans

 * Genetecist Michael Hammer reports findings that demonstrate that after the initial "out of Africa" radiation of modern humans at about 100,000 years ago, some humans eventually returned to Africa between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago.