A fantastic new series on Dinosaurs of the British Isles airs tonight on ITV! It stars Dean Lomax, a professional palaeontologist based pretty much everywhere in the UK. It seems to be based off a book of his, published via Siri Press. I’ve seen a copy, and it’s pretty much the best illustrated guides to dinosaurs ever. Here’s a preview below, so at 9pm GMT, kick off your shoes, ...[Read More]
dinosaurs
They might be giants, but how could they live with each other?
Sauropod dinosaurs are the biggest animals to have ever walked on land. They are instantly recognised by their long, sweeping necks and whiplashed tails, and nearly always portrayed moving in herds, being stalked by hungry predators. In recent years, a huge amount of taxonomic effort from scientists has vastly increased the number of known species of sauropod. What we now know is that in many area ...[Read More]
Top 10 dinosaur facts!
For those of you who may not have been aware, I was fortunate enough to recently publish a dinosaur book for kids, complete with build-it-yourself pop-out dinosaurs. I’ve recently published an article in The Guardian about it, which features much of the great artwork by Vladimir Nikolov. It’s all about some of the perhaps less well-known dinosaur facts that feature in the book, so enjo ...[Read More]
IPC Day 2 – The evolution of giants
This is a slightly delayed summary of the sauropod symposium on day 2 of IPC4, following sessions the previous day on vertebrate taphonomy and diversity and extinction in the fossil record. This is also the final of these little summaries, and for that I apologise – my laptop is a bit kaput atm, and needs power sockets to run and which were not available in some of the rooms. I might be a little c ...[Read More]
Grim reaper or gentle giants?
Therizinosaurs were some of the true freaks of the dinosaur world. I mean that in the nicest possible way for something that looked like the sick offspring of a giant chicken and Freddie Kruger. Perhaps the weirdest things about them were these long, scythe-like claws, that although may have seemed deadly, probably weren’t unless you were a particularly scrummy looking piece of foliage. That’s rig ...[Read More]
Your bite or mine?
It rises from the dark waters like some behemoth from the deep, and lets out a blood-curdling roar. It’s feeding time. One of the most iconic scenes from Jurassic Park III is where the long-snouted, sail-backed giant theropod dinosaur Spinosaurus emerges from underwater to try, yet again, to eat our beleaguered rabble of misfortunates. It’s always been the way these dinosaurs have been portrayed, ...[Read More]
Another clue to the origins of dinosaurs
Often the early evolution and radiation of the first dinosaurs is an overlooked part of their tale, in favour of the more dramatic but arguably no less important tales of their later radiations and extinctions. It is actually a fairly poorly understood part of their evolution too, with the timing, and actual mechanism that drove them to become the most successful land group ever still a bit of a m ...[Read More]
The greatest mass extinction in the history of life
In palaeontology, there are so many things more important than dinosaurs. For example, the study of large-scale patterns in the history of life on Earth, commonly known as macroevolution, is all about uncovering patterns of speciation and extinction. We are currently about to enter the sixth mass extinction within the last 542 million years of life on Earth, so figuring out exactly what happened d ...[Read More]
The Cambridge Science Festival
Last night, I was honoured to have spoken at the final evening lecture at the Cambridge Science Festival, along with Nick Crumpton, Anjali Goswami, Rob Asher, and Stephanie Pierce, about why palaeontology is important. Below is a rough transcript of some of what my talk was about. Unlike the others, I didn’t discuss my own research. Instead, by general gist was that although palaeontology is ...[Read More]
Steampunk takes evolution to the next level
Sharing this purely because it’s amazing. Hat-tip to John Hutchinson for sharing!