In a recent blog post, I’d just picked up our little opalised dinosaur during a visit to Lightning Ridge. Eager to have a look, I took it back to my hotel room to examine inside the three tatty boxes labelled ‘The Briefcase Dinosaur’. What followed was a wondrous couple of hours sorting through numerous plastic…
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We take a look at some amazing dinosaur footprints while visiting the Isle of Wight.
We’re off and racing! The last couple of years have been tough on everyone, and Palaeo Pictures is no exception. Hampered in being able to get out and about to do constructive and interesting things, both COVID and a lack of funds has kept us shackled at home with little to do. But now it’s…
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Ok, so Stonehenge is a little bit recent for palaeontology but it’s still a fascinating trip into the past!
Come with us on a dinosaur hunt on the Isle of Wight! Meet some of the fossil hunters and palaeontologists who are bringing these ancient creatures back to life.
Palaeontologists from the University of Southampton have described a few bones from the largest land-dwelling predator the UK has ever seen. The fragments are from a spinosaurid theropod dinosaur closely related to Spinosaurus as featured in some of the Jurassic Park movies. Lead researcher Dr Neil Gostling hopes to find more of this incredible creature!
A crucial part of a bird’s flying apparatus is the furcular, or wishbone, which helps to provide some spring-effect to the down-stroke of a birds wing. The question had long been how and when did the furcular evolve? It wasn’t until John Ostrom in the mid 1960’s that it was realised that the wishbone is…
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After evolving the capacity for powered flight early in the Eocene, bats rapidly dispersed around the world and are found on most continents. Where they were suspiciously absent in this ancient disposal as mainland Asia. A report out today in the journal Biology Letter announces that gap has been bridged by the finding of two…
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A new short-faced archosauriform from Arizona, USA, was described in the journal The Science In Nature this week. Archosauriforms are a group of diapsid reptiles that first appeared in the Late Permian and includes crocodiles, pterosaurs, dinosaurs and birds as well as the crocodile-like proterosuchids. This new species probably belongs within the crocodiles and comes from the upper Triassic, around 219 million years ago.…
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One of the confusing problems of understanding the evolutionary origin of birds is the fact that all the bones in a bird skull are fused together. This makes it difficult to identify individual bones and work out how they relate to other creatures. That’s why the announcement in Nature today so important. In it a…
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