All mouth, no butt: Scientists find the ancestor of all vertebrates (like us).
BBC has an up-close look at the tiny, primitive face of the great-great-great-great-etc. grandaddy of anything with a backbone: They say that fossilised traces of […]
paleontology
In the days of Transylvania’s flying T. rexes….
New Scientist introduces us to a fearsome creature (thankfully no longer among us) that ruled the prehistoric Romanian skies like a flying tyrannosaur: New fossils […]
Science Art: Trilobites (Sketch Pad), by Manchestersciart
Click to embiggen Prehistoric life, today’s exercises. From Life in Retrograde, via ScientificIllustration.tumblr.com.
“This misshapen pebble is actually the first ever dinosaur brain fossil ever found.”
Vox takes a close look at a fossilized iguanodon brain: On a dark winter night in 2004, Jamie Hiscocks spotted an odd-shaped stone on a […]
Dinosaurs probably boomed instead of singing.
Science Daily looks into some really old larynxes (larynges?) with University of Texas, Austin, researchers and concludes dinosaurs, though bird-like, didn’t sing – they honked […]
Ptiny Pterosaurs
Nature introduces a little guy who’s upending the way we think about the age of dinosaurs… a time when pterosaurs ruled the skies with 10-meter […]
Prepare to make prehistoric monsters
Nature braces for the fun in the gene labs, as CRISPR paves the way to recreate bygone creatures: The precise, efficient CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing technique has […]
Science Art: Clash of the Triassic Titans: Phytosaur vs. Rauisuchian, by Julio Lacerda.
Click to embiggen This is a recreation of a weird ecosystem – one without any beef, basically. The Chinle formation, a primordial swamp in what […]
SONG: “Not a Pony.”
SONG: “Not a Pony”. ARTIST: grant, featuring Enok Webb. SOURCE: “Horse-sized tyrannosaur may be long-sought missing link in T.rex evolution,” Washington Post, March 14, 2016, […]
Science Art: Plate XII foldout by Thomas Davidson, from The geologist : a popular monthly magazine of geology.
These are fossilized shells from Thomas Davidson’s “On Some Fossil Brachiopoda,” or “Palaeontological Notes on the Brachiopoda,” from this magazine dedicated to amateur geologists published […]
Tyrannosaur pregnant?
Washington Post has peeked as experts sexed a T. rex: The team from North Carolina State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences […]
Wee rex. Awwww.
I stole the name from Reuters, but it was Joel Achenbach at Washington Post that first pointed me toward the news that they’ve found a […]
Fossilized nerves.
Washington Post reports on an impossible-seeming thing – a fossil that’s not just of hard tissue like teeth and bones (and shells), but that reveals […]
Science Art: Figure 4, Neopteroplax conemaughensis, 1963
Click to embiggen Such a winning smile…. Neopteroplax was, at one point, something like a crocodile of salamanders – an amphibian about 3 meters long […]
Coffee (and pepper) of the dinosaurs discovered.
Discovery News hypes the headline a little here (but forgivably) by declaring that a 45-million-year-old prehistoric coffee has been discovered preserved in amber: Named Strychnos […]