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 […]
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 […]
One of the most important things palaeontologists and taxonomists do is the description of new species or fossils. Focussing on dinosaurs, because they’re the ones I know the best, there is a whole host of descriptive anatomy to get your head around. It’s not just the names of the bones; it’s also the names of […]
I recently wrote a small series about how geoscientists can become more effective communicators of scientific knowledge to the general public, and the pitfalls and issues associated with this. The overall strategy revolved around using the right type of language, along with a context and narrative to create relevant stories, but above all this, to […]
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, […]
Most of what we know about dinosaurs comes from their skeletal remains. Rarely, we get tiny glimpses into their soft tissue anatomy through skin impressions and even rarer, preserved tissue fragments, mummified over time, and their ecology and life habits through combining interpretation of this from what we can glean from trace fossils (footprints, poop, […]
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 […]