The latest species to be added to the oviraptorosaur family tree is Gobiraptor minutus, described by scientists this week. This absolutely adorable new species is known from a juvenile specimen, and the reconstruction below by Do Yoon Kim reveals just how cute this little proto-thief could be. Source: Mongolian proto-thief dinosaur had egg-crushing jaws | […]
Everything we know about dinosaurs comes from their fossil record, and how we as humans document and interpret that. As such, our understanding of their evolution is based on what is known at any given point in time, and subject to change as new discoveries are made. As any science should be! Alessandro Chiarenza, Matt […]
Snakes are beautiful and bizarre animals. Limbless vertebrates, they have been around for more than 150 million years, and occupy almost every ecological role possible, including living under the sea! Over geological time, they have come in all sorts of shapes and sizes (typically still sausage-ish shaped), and have a unique evolutionary history. One particular […]
Naming a new species is a wonderful thing to do. It’s a statement that you’ve discovered an entirely new organism to science, and naming it is a personal touch about how you perceive the importance of it. Last year, researchers named a 34 million year old canine-like fossil from Egypt, with an exquisitely preserved skull. […]
Jurassic World, you got it all wrong. Why make up a new dinosaur by fusing genetics, when you already have one that was terrifying enough? And also real. Source: Tyrannosaurs – the weird lovers we always wanted them to be? | PLOS Paleo Community
It’s raining crocs We have a new paper out! An international team of researchers, including myself, have published on a new fossil specimen of a crocodile-ancestor (Crocodyliformes). The specimen is around 160 million years old, from the Middle Jurassic of the Isle of Skye in Scotland. It’s Open Access, of course, and available here. It’s […]
The Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is a public, digital archive of the fossil record. Based on countless hours of work from more than 400 scientists around the world, it now contains more than 1.3 million individual fossil occurrences from around the world in a single database that is accessible by everyone. That’s pretty awesome. What’s even more […]
This article was originally posted here. While artistic reconstructions of dinosaurs preying on each other are a fantastic way of illustrating the real-life behaviours of these fantastic creatures, direct evidence of dinosaur-food interactions in the fossil record are surprisingly rare. In modern ecosystems, it’s quite easy to establish ecological interactions between predators, prey, and plants […]
One month ago, I defended my PhD thesis and passed my viva exam, proving that basically anyone can become a Doctor these days. I got ‘minor revisions’ as a result, which was just to shorten the abstract to institutional format requirements, and cut the waffle from the Introduction. I kinda liked the waffle though, as […]
If I ask you to think of a large, extinct carnivorous reptile, what do you think of? I’m gonna guess that pretty much all of you went straight for a T. rex, or if you’re a bit weird (or vegetarian), maybe a Stegosaurus. But if you think back in time of when the dinosaurs were […]