What comes to your mind when someone says ‘theropod dinosaurs’ to you? Does the mind conjour images of Tyrannosaurus rex noshing on lawyers, packs of voracious Deinonychus ambushing unsuspecting ornithopods, or perhaps you’re quite progressive and thought about flocks of birds migrating south for the winter. Sticking strictly to the Mesozoic (before 65.5 million years […]
Archaeopteryx lithogaphica is probably the most iconic dinosaur ever. When it was first discovered, it was heralded as the holy grail of palaeontological findings, as it helped to consolidate the evolutionary continuum between theropod dinosaurs and modern birds. What it also represents though, is an example of the evolution of scientific thought through time. Palaeontologists, […]
Dinosaurs. What springs to mind when they’re mentioned? The colossal sauropods? Packs of feisty feathered fiends? Or huge herds of hadrosaurs, chomping their way across the plains of long lost worlds? Most, including myself, will automatically default to any one of these archetypal images when dinosaurs come up in conversation (what, you mean it’s not […]
Dinosaurs and farting. Two of mankind’s favourite things. Put them together, and apparently that warrants a scientific publication. A new study has attempted to forge a correlation between sauropod dinosaurs, their gassy output, and global warming during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Naturally, being a bit obscure, it’s received great attention in the media. The […]
The story of vertebrate evolution over the last 250 million years is one of the most remarkable, and most complex to unravel, stories of all time. Throughout the ages, extraordinary species and groups have come and gone, and we are left now with only a fingerprint of times long forgotten. Recreating and detecting macroevolutionary patterns […]
Childhood memories of dinosaurs have received another shattering blow today. The latest culprit is Yutyrannus huali, a large basal tyrannosauroid from the lower Cretaceous of China, complete with elongate integumental filament structures, or ‘protofeathers’. The etymology is quite special, says lead author Xing Xu, translating into a blend of Mandarin and Latin as ‘beautiful feathered […]
When people discuss innovation and cutting-edge research in science, Palaeontology, and specifically dinosaurs, will hardly be the first thing that springs to mind, especially in times of the Large Hadron Collider, nanotechnology, and stem cell research. But in terms of actual progress, considering that dinosaurs have only existed in science and the eyes of the […]
The time of digital technology is upon us. No scientific domain is embracing it’s fast-paced and dynamic progression more so than Palaeontology. One such realm that is exploding with new studies and enrapturing the minds of people and the global media is the increasing possibility to digitise and manipulate three-dimensional fossils. Surface laser-scanning, C-T scanning […]
Recently, a really important paper by Alex Dunhill of Bristol University, UK, (@AlexDunhill on Twitter) has been published looking at the problems of using rock outcrop area as a sampling proxy for understanding patterns of biodiversity in deep geological time. What this paper highlights is the important distinction between geological and anthropological sampling proxies, and […]
Not surprisingly, the latest Archaeopteryx study has kicked up quite a stir within the media and scientific realms, considering the iconic status it has attained since discovery some 150 years past. This latest paper by Carney et al. and published in the journal Nature Communications claims to have resolved the plumage colour of a feather […]