Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous week. Palaeontology News Lessner et al: New insights into Late Triassic dinosauromorph-bearing assemblages from Texas using apomorphy-based identifications. Xu et al: A new Middle Jurassic diplodocoid suggests an earlier dispersal and […]
Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Previous week. Palaeontology news Campbell et al: New insights into chasmosaurine (Dinosauria: Ceratopsidae) skulls from the Upper Cretaceous (Campanian) of Alberta, and an update on the distribution of accessory frill fenestrae […]
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. […]
Mass extinctions are insanely catastrophic, but important, events that punctuate the history of life on Earth. The Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary, around 145 million years ago, was originally thought of to represent a mass extinction, but has subsequently been ‘down-graded’ to a minor extinction event based on new discoveries. However, compared to other important stratigraphic boundaries, like […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1037 Let’s go meta. Recently, ecologist extraordinaire Dr. Jacquelyn Gill (or is it Professor cos of that weird American system?) wrote a wonderful review article on the extinctions that affected many large mammal species during the last 50-10,000 years. This period is known as the Quaternary, and was a time when […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=466 How can the dead help the living? This is a question a lot of fossil-fanatics have bent a lot of time towards over recent years, partially due to a desire to make palaeontology ‘relevant’ as a modern science, and secondly to help guide our efforts in conservation biology. A new […]
The fossil record is brutally frustrating; it mostly preserves only vestiges of deaths long past as body fossils, with occasional glimpses of life being gleaned from their surroundings and any trace fossils, or activity fossils that we might find. One question palaeontologists have long been seeking the answer for is how good were dinosaurs as […]
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 […]
Disclaimer: Apparently Carlsberg don’t write my titles.. Back in May 2011, a study was published in Science describing the application of sclerotic ring and orbital morphology in determining daily activity (diel) patterns in extinct archosaurs. Recently, a comment and counter-comment have been published, both with pretty critical rhetoric. I figured that as it appears to […]