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Known From Fossils First
While writing your dissertation, you come across many fascinating tidbits written as passing remarks. They are so interesting that you happily spend time chasing down the original references and...
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Why Paleontology Is Relevant
In these times of budget cuts and belt-tightening, you might wonder why our government, universities, and museums should fund paleontological research. After all, there are bridges to repair, children...
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How species are like pornography: Species concepts and the fossil record
Recently I helped name a new species, an animal we think is the oldest dinosaur found to date—if not, it’s the closest cousin to dinosaurs we know of (Nesbitt et al. 2013). It was the first time I’ve...
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The [Fossil] Treasure of the Sierra Nevada
The Sierra Nevada mountain range is known for its gorgeous alpine lakes, magnificent peaks, and glacier-carved valleys. It’s home to five national parks and monuments, and the only place in the world...
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Sharing Paleodata (Part 2): Dryad
As promised, today I begin a series on repositories used for paleontological raw data. I will focusing on repositories to which data is submitted before publication, so that mention of it can appear in...
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What’s My Age Again?
Earlier this month, an almost 40 pound rockfish was caught in Alaska that was allegedly 200 years old. The angler that caught the enormous fish based this age on body size estimates. Then, earlier this...
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Not Just Jaws…Claws Mark Bone Too!
After a long journey through the millennia, fossils inevitably arrive in the present as damaged goods. Bacteria, scavengers, erosion, wind, rain, and even sunlight conspire to destroy the remains of...
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Paleoecology of Magnificent Megafauna: The Moa
There was a time not so long ago (thousands of years ago, not millions, which is not so long ago to a paleontologist) when ecosystems around the world had something that is generally lacking today:...
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Prehistoric Platypus: Revenge of the Monotremes
(I tried to make the title of the post sound like a SyFy movie title, let me know how I did) Obdurodon tharalkooschild is not your garden-variety platypus. Today, the platypus is one of two remaining...
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How much did that dead bird weigh?
“How heavy was it?” Body mass is not just an intuitive way to compare the size of animals, but it’s also critical for understanding their biology. Numerous scientifically interesting attributes can be...
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Q&A with Daniel Field–Weighing Dead Birds
Although we can directly weigh modern birds, we can’t do this with extinct birds–and we need to know body mass to understand their biology! The previous post on this blog reviewed a newly published...
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Sharing Phylogenetic Data — Public Comment Invited
Data sharing is important–it helps scientists to reproduce others’ results, add data to previous analyses, and otherwise maximize the impact of an individual publication. This isn’t really news, of...
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Shake Your Tail Bone! (and shape your skeleton, if you’re a bird)
This is either a cheap tactic to increase blog traffic via the internet’s unhealthy obsession with cats, or an oddly relevant image. The Manx cat has a mutation that results in a shortened tail. Image...
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Paleontology in a Sink Hole: Spring Break Edition
Last week, I spent time at the Bahamas Natural History Symposium in Nassau, Bahamas. Seeing policy makers, ecologists, educators, geologists, and anthropologists come together was awesomely inspiring...
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Baby moa bones: more than meets the eye
Best buddies Richard Owen and the giant moa. Owen 1879, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. The name “moa” inevitably conjures up pictures of giant, lumbering bird-beasts, destined for extinction at...
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Can penguins tell us how far the Cretaceous diving bird Hesperornis wandered?
Don’t mess with Hesperornis. It was a flightless, aquatic Cretaceous bird that measured up to six feet long, had a beak lined with sharp teeth, and was partially responsible for the downfall of at...
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Lungfish brains ain’t boring
I tend to think of fish brains as fairly unremarkable. Too simple relative to mammal brains, too un-dinosaur-y relative to dinosaur brains. Shark and perch brains get a brief nod in many comparative...
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Guest Post: Can We Easily Distinguish Male and Female Protoceratops?
This guest post is from Leonardo Maiorino, a vertebrate paleontologist with a particular interest in understanding the evolution of the skull in horned dinosaurs. Leo was at the helm of a recent paper...
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The Curse of the Horned Dinosaur Egg
Horned dinosaurs (ceratopsians) just can’t catch a break when it comes to their fossilized eggs. The first purported examples turned up in Mongolia during the 1920s, attributed to Protoceratops. A few...
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Fossil Lizard Showcases Wyoming’s Tropical Wonderland
Wyoming is a beautiful place, but usually it is associated more with open range, cowboys, mountains, and skiing than it is with palm trees and alligators. What a difference 48 million years makes!...
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