Here's the second part of my picks for the March Mammal Madness competition, specifically, the extinct mammal  'Antecessors' division. You can read my picks for the first four pairs here. ​PSEUDAELURUS VS. ARCHAEOINDRIS Left image by Jay Matternes. Right by Wiki user Smokeybjb. Pseudaelurus were relatively slender ancient felids, ranging in...

It's that time of year again: time for March Mammal Madness!  For the uninitiated, March Mammal Madness (or MMM) is a fun fake hypothetical 'battle' between different species of animals, alive or extinct, using a sports-style bracket to guess or predict who you think will win. Then a team of biologists go onto Twitter and (having done their...

It turns out that ancient birds including Archaeopteryx may have been too fat to sit on their eggs without breaking them. Most modern birds will sit on clutches of eggs to incubate them (this is called 'contact incubation'). And the bird lineage stretches back to the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous (during the Mesozoic). But when did birds start to contact...

I gave a TEDx talk late last year where I chatted about taphonomy and decay in the fossil record, in Japanese Buddhist paintings, and on Mars. If that sounds interesting to you, check out the video below!

What a week it's been for palaeontology in the news, especially related to taphonomy! There's a new paper on the taphonomy of the Cleveland-Llyod Dinosaur Quarry, a paper describing featherless patches of skin on Tyrannosaurus rex, and now a mid-Cretaceous 'bird' (avialan) hatchling has been found encased in Burmese amber! Photograph of the amber...

I had a chat with Greg Wah and Dan Beeston at the podcast Smart Enough to Know Better about the taphonomy of two beautifully preserved dinosaur fossils in the news: Zuul crurivastator, a new ankylosaur from Montana named after a Ghostbusters character (image below left), and a beautifully preserved nodosaur from the oil sands deposits of Alberta...