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Jon Tennant

Jon began university life as a geologist, followed by a treacherous leap into the life sciences. He spent several years at Imperial College London, investigating the extinction and biodiversity patterns of Mesozoic tetrapods – anything with four legs or flippers – to discover whether or not there is evidence for a ‘hidden’ mass extinction 145 million years ago. Alongside this, Jon researched the origins and evolution of ‘dwarf’ crocodiles called atoposaurids. Prior to this, there was a brief interlude were Jon was immersed in the world of science policy and communication, which greatly shaped his views on the broader role that science can play, and in particular, the current ‘open’ debate. Jon tragically passed away in 2020.

Your poop or mine?

Back in the Mesozoic, lavatories probably didn’t exist. In fact, dinosaurs and other animals were probably pretty poorly mannered and just pooped wherever they felt like. But what or who cleaned up after them? In modern biomes, poop is decomposed by insects and bacteria of all breeds, and actually forms quite an important part of energy flow within ecosystems. But was it the same million of years ago during the reign of the dinosaurs?

Imagine a natural world without decomposers. Carcasses would litter landscapes, and there’d be a neat smattering of faeces decorating everything like jam. Humans have adapted beyond this need for decomposers by creating the loo – dinosaurs weren’t so technologically efficient, and one can only imagine the issues T. rex would have trying to flush anyway.

T rex poop

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Absolutely no sniggering – the dinosaur that looked like a cock

Dinosaur skeletons are a thing of pure beauty. Being able to see and touch something that has been dead for millions of years instills a sense of wonder; what did they look like, how did they behave, were they like anything we see today? Palaeontology is a science that raises more questions than it answers, but these questions are the ones that drive the science, but also maintain that sense of fascination that no other scientific field can lay claim to.

Every now and then, we are blessed with a true jewel.  Many can lay claims to the discovery of a dinosaur bone, even fewer to that of a whole skeleton. Celebrity status is achieved when one finds something that truly stands out, a dinosaur preserved in immortality with flesh, and these are the rarest of all.

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Were dinosaurs the masters of social integration?

Back in the Late Cretaceous, the USA was divided. Not politically, but by a vast continental sea called the Western Interior Seaway, splitting the continent into two separate landmasses. The western one of these, known as Laramidia, played host to some of the popular dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus, or ‘Elvis’ in Pete Postlethwaite dialect, and the ceratopsian Chasmosaurus. One of the cool things about Laramidia though, is that you had a whopping great amount of these megaherbivorous dinosaurs, or omnomnomosaurs, living together in the same time and place. How could one area contain such a vast number and range of dinosaurs?

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In which we explain how camel ankle bones relate to the fate of global ecosystems.

This was originally posted at 4th Dimensional Biology by Brianna McHorse and Edward Davis. Reblogging because awesome (with permission).

I’m taking time away from comic book blogging to do some actual SCIENCE BLOGGING. Just last month I published a paper in Palaeontologia Electronica with my esteemed colleague Brianna McHorse (who blogs over at Fossilosophy). It’s called “A method for improved identification of postcrania from mammalian fossil assemblages: multivariate discriminant function analysis of camelid astragali.” In this paper, we work with fossilized camel ankle bones from theThousand Creek of Nevada that are about 8 million years old. Here’s the plain-language abstract for those who don’t speak paleontology. Brianna and I have coauthored this blog post to share the wonders of these ankle bones with a broader audience.

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