This was originally posted at my new blog at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/2013/03/18/your-track-or-mine/ How do you tell between different dinosaurs, when you don’t have any dinosaurs? Trace fossils, like footprints, are ghosts of dinosaurs past, remnants of life entombed within the rocks. Palaeontologists and ichnologists (scientists who study trace fossils, not fish) often used to get confused by […]
There’s nothing quite like seeing something in the field. I came to this realisation about half way through my Masters course. When I started, I was a fully-fledged Geoscientist and taking on biological knowledge would have been an immense challenge if it hadn’t been for the engaging, rapid-fire seminars given by Dr Rob Hughes. He […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/2013/02/18/its-just-a-flesh-wound/ Fossils, as we typically think about them, tell us about the death of an animal. The teeth, bones, shells, fragmented pseudopods and other weird and wonderful bits of carcass all only ever reflect one thing: a permanent geological limbo. These types of fossil are known as body fossils. The other […]
The discovery of extractable dinosaur DNA is many a scientist’s dream. The idea of finding DNA within extinct animals has an air of mystery and discovery that is just ridiculously appealing, whether you’re 5, 50, a teacher, palaeontologist, or cab driver. I think this is part of human nature, where we always seem to have […]
Dinosaurs! What image sprang to your mind then? There’s a reasonable chance, I’d hazard, that your brain just conjured an image of ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex, a nimble and intelligent Velociraptor mongoliensis, or any one of the other meat-eating theropods, notoriously infamous thanks to a certain eccentric millionaire with a passion for splicing genes. These two […]
In a great many species, females exhibit preferences for larger males – including that world-dominating species Homo sapiens (though a recent PLoS ONE study reveals the effect is only modest in actual couples). Certainly in the marine environment, choices such as this correspond to greater fitness in a species, with larger individuals being more fertile […]
Colima, Mexico. The goal: unearthing the secrets of Vulcán de Fuego or the “Volcano of Fire”. Fuego erupts roughly every two hours. Nothing major, just an outburst of billowing steam clouds from the summit, generally lasting no more than 10 minutes. These outbursts release pressure in the magma chamber below, and by letting off steam; […]
Among the many issues with the fossil record is the case of gender identification. In modern organisms, it is usually pretty easy to tell which members of a particular species are the males and which are the females. This can either be through consistently perving on them to figure it out during copulation, or some […]
Two new feathered dinosaur articles appeared in the latest edition of Nature Communications; one on gender identification in a well-known theropod (the meat noshing ones), and the subject of a forthcoming blog post, and another on a new feathered fiend from, surprise surprise, China. I normally really don’t like writing about theropods, especially of the feathered […]
Palaeontology probably isn’t the most difficult of sciences, but it does incorporate aspects of chemistry, biology, and physics to a certain degree, as with many other geoscientific disciplines. Palaeontologists are also well known for the mysterious and unintelligible ‘science-speak’ that they use in research papers, fueled by this combination of a multitude of various sciences, […]