Paleontology

Friday Fossil

This week's Friday Fossil is Helicoprion. What can I say. This is one weird bastard. And it used to look even weirder, The story is like this. At the turn of the last century, people started to find these strange dinner plate sized fossils that look s ...

Blog Post - Oliver Knevitt - May 9 2011 - 7:07am

Awww... its an ickle baby Tyrannosaur!

Cute!! Well, not really, but it's still just about big enough to play on the swings with you. Unlike his rather more terrifying parents, who might have rather impolitely eaten you for dinner, this little guy didn't have the strength in its jaws ...

Blog Post - Oliver Knevitt - May 10 2011 - 12:09pm

Friday Fossil

What do you get if you mix a jellysifh (Peytoia), a sponge (Laggania), a crustacean tail, a crustacean abdomen (Tuzoia) and some Sidneyia tails? The answer is Anomalocaris, a very unusual fossil from the famous Burgess shale. ...

Blog Post - Oliver Knevitt - May 14 2011 - 10:59am

Gastroliths & Elasmosaurs

Elasmosaurs loved their gastroliths – round, polished stomach stones – have been found amid their bones. These stones would have been swallowed to help grind down their catch and lower their natural buoyancy. Surprisingly elasmosaurs displayed a remarkable ...

Blog Post - Heidi Henderson - May 14 2011 - 10:02pm

Field Notes:Stalking the Wild Dinosaur Footprint

Hello to the K. B. Polk 4th graders! I enjoyed your visit to Cedar Ridge Natural Preserve.  As I told some of you, I'm a scientist and I was going out to South Texas that weekend to find some dinosaur prints.  I told your teachers I'd write a let ...

Blog Post - Mel. White - May 16 2011 - 2:59pm

The Biggest Trilobite In The World

I'll share with you my most recent finds, which I found at Craigleith last weekend in a brief interlude from the fieldwork that I'm doing down the road from there: ...

Article - Oliver Knevitt - Jun 2 2011 - 11:07am

Prelude To The Final 3: Of Fossils And Physicists

Firstly, I guess an apology is in order. Its been a hell of a long time since number 4 went out; I got rather caught up with other things and this series then languished on my list of half-written articles. So, apologies for that! But before we get crackin ...

Article - Oliver Knevitt - May 31 2011 - 11:22pm

The 5 Greatest Palaeontology Hoaxes Of All Time #3. Archaeoraptor

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is true of all science, but especially in palaeontology, where only a handful of exceptional fossils can give a disproportionate amount of weight to a hypothesis. As a consequence, palaeontologists ...

Article - Oliver Knevitt - Jun 8 2011 - 1:54pm

Friday Fossil

This rather sorry creature can be found in a lab in the ROM, hidden away with some old CRT monitors, This guy is Hallucigenia, another fossil from the exquisite Burgess Shale fauna- a contemporary of Anomalocaris of last week's friday fossil. Hallucig ...

Blog Post - Oliver Knevitt - Jun 3 2011 - 1:30pm

Friday Fossil

This week's friday fossil is Cheirotherium (or Isocheirotherium, whichever you want). Every year, thousands of geology students descend on the tiny Isle of Arran in the inner Hebrides. Its unique in the way you have so many different rocks all crammed ...

Blog Post - Oliver Knevitt - Jun 18 2011 - 7:04pm