From XKCD- Break-ups are better with junior synonyms.


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The entire world seems to have gone utterly insane over this fossil, known colloquially as "Ida", but officially as Darwinius masillae. And it is a lovely fossil. It is also important because it will, I'm sure, tell us lots about what was going on in primate evolution 47 million years ago. I'm not going to go through the reports because there are ( Read more... )

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. Best known for formulating the theory of evolution by means of Natural Selection (which explains how the peacock got its wings), less well known for coming up with the theory of Sexual Selection (which explains how the peacock got its tail), and totally ignored for explaining how coral reefs formed ( Read more... )

Further from my last post I mentioned a fossil whale most of you may never have heard of until this morning. Maiacetus inuus "Inuus' Mother Whale", named for the Roman god of fecundity, and important features of the holotype, which I will come to ( Read more... )

The following is adapted from a dissertation I wrote several years ago.

Fossils have been recognised as the remains of living organisms since the time of Leonardo da Vinci and before. At the close of the 18th century the French anatomist George Cuvier developed the idea of extinction, demonstrating that many fossils are not those of modern species. ( Read more... )

This blog seems to have turned into a TV/Media reporting site recently. Never mind.
The Beeb have a new series out called "Fossil Detectives". Presented by Hermione Cockburn it is an 8-part series made by the OU. (So that should be a good indicator of quality.) Sadly, unlike the OU shows I remember as a child there's a distinct lack of beards, and ( Read more... )

Some of you may have seen this paper at PLoS ONE. Its a rather nifty piece of work by Darren Naish and Mark Witton (who's very nice drawings accompany the article itself, and the various newspaper reports.)

Basically a group of pterosaurs called Azdarchids have always been a bit of a problem for palaeontologists working out their lifestyle. They're ( Read more... )

Yet another aberrant theropod from China. Called Gansus yumenensis, after the area it was found its 100 million years young. It looks a lot like the modern diver (or Hesperornis a large flightless toothed bird.) Feathers and the webbing between the toes is preserved. Sadly its missing a skull. But its still pretty. And ist shows the kind of ( Read more... )

Three updates in a day!

I used to admire and respect Robert Bakker, the enfant terrible of vertebrate palaeontology- many of his ideas in "The Dinosaur Heresies" were wrong, but at least they were interestingly wrong, in a way that made people say "that can't be right, lets go out and show the beardie hippie that he's wrong". Now I'm beginning to ( Read more... )

They've just found fossil phytoliths (the little silica granules in grass leaves) in some dinosaur poo! It seems that grasses are much older than we thought. The article notes that pollen had been recorded from India, South America and Africa and was a similar age (65-70 my).

Its certainly interesting and may mean a reinterpretation of several ( Read more... )