Paleontology

It's always the way. Within the last week, there's been so many fantastic papers out that I literally have no idea where to start. People always seem to publish these things when I am most busy. It…

This week's Friday fossil is Samotherium. Samotherium is an ancient Giraffe. It's skull is two feet long, with two horns, and it's thigh bones are twice as big as a human's. These are its milk teeth…

I am pleased to present once again an interesting TED talk. O.K., the talk is a little on the slow side, but Jack Horner’s Shape Shifting Dinosaurs is worth watching, for it shows yet again something…

Every 6 months or so these days it feels like we find the earliest animal life. More often than not, said life is something ugly that turns up in a bucket after dissolving rocks in acid. Well, it's…

...this turns up. This thing is Siphusauctum gregarium, and is known from over 1000 specimens. It probably looked something like this, The good news is that it's published in PLoS ONE so you can go…

This is pretty funny; this is based on (supposedly genuine) letter sent to a well respected US museum. Obviously the names of institutions and individuals have been changed. Dear Mr. Smith: Thank you…

.  Many First Nations sites were inhabited continually for centuries. The discarded shells and scraps of bone from their food formed enormous mounds called middens. Left over time, these…

Dragonflies, from the order Odonata, have been around for over 250 million years.  I've seen fossil dragonflies from the Eocene some 50 million years ago that would have been exquisite monsters…

The late Devonian, about 390 million years ago to roughly 360 million years ago, was a time of struggle and escape for fish in a drying environment, theorized paleontologist Alfred Romer.  That…

A new species of horned dinosaur, Spinops sternbergorum, was announced today by an international team of scientists nearly 100 years after the initial discovery of the fossil. Spinops sternbergorum…