“Jurassic Pompeii” found by amateur rock sleuth Neville Hollingworth, who scoured old maps and records looking for ‘lost’ UK fossil sites. The huge number of sea creatures and land plants in the rocks reminded him of Pompei according to BBC News 22 July 2021. Enter palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London who are […]
Mass baby burial of 1400 juvenile animals, according to reports in ScienceDaily and Penn State News 28 June 2021 and Nature Ecology and Evolution 28 June 2021, doi: 10.1038/s41559-021-01490-4. Palaeontologists have found an exceptionally preserved trove of soft bodied invertebrate fossils from a rock formation named the Haiyan Lagerstätte located in Haiyan, China. The term […]
Giant croc roamed South-East Queensland, according to reports in ABC News and ScienceDaily 14 June 2021 and Scientific Reports 9 June 2021, doi: 10.1038/s41598-021-91717-y. A group of scientists led by Jorgo Ristevski of University of Queensland have studied a piece of skull from an extinct crocodile, originally found in the nineteenth century, and stored in […]
Megashark gets more mega, according to Science Alert and SciTechDaily 9 June 2021, and Palaeontologia Electronica DOI: 10.26879/1140. The size of the extinct giant fossil shark now named Otodus megalodon (used to be Carcharodon) has been re-estimated using the size of its teeth compared with teeth from the living Great White shark, then using the […]
Oldest horned dinosaur found, according to reports in ScienceDaily 11 May 2021 and SciTech Daily 14 May 2021 and PalZ, 10 May 2021, doi: 10.1007/s12542-021-00555-w. Scientists in from the University of Pennsylvania and New Mexico Museum of Natural History have studied the fossil of a horned dinosaur originally found in 1966 in the Menefee Formation […]
Oldest cephalopods may have been found, claim scientists via reports in ScienceDaily 23 March 2021, Science Alert 25 March2021 and Communications Biology 23 March 2021, doi: 10.1038/s42003-021-01885-w. Scientists at the University of Heidelberg have studied fossils from the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland, Canada, and identified them as fossil cephalopods. Living cephalopods include octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and […]
Dino frills for flirting, claim scientists in reports in Natural History Museum news and Science Focus 3 February 2021, Live Science 5 February 2021, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B 3 February 2021 doi: 10.1098/rspb.2020.2938. Dinosaurs known as Ceratopsians have distinctive bony frills projecting from the backs of their skulls. This has been thought […]
Giant fish fossil found with pterodactyl, reported by University of Portsmouth news and PhysOrg 15 February 2021, ScienceDaily 16 February 2021, and Cretaceous Research published online 23 January 2021 doi: 10.1016/j.cretres.2021.104768. Scientists from University of Portsmouth were asked to identify a fossil bony structure found with a group of wing bones from a pterosaur. The […]
Morocco is one of the best places in the world for fossils, and one of the best places in Morocco is the Kem Kem Basin, Khouribga, especially for aquatic fossils. The Kem Kem basin is a massive bone bed made up of mineral phosphates (usually derived from bone) and it is the largest known phosphorite […]
Human thumbs are two million years old, according to reports in Science (AAAS) News and SciTech Daily 28 January and Current Biology 28 January 2021 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.12.041. Scientists at the University of Tübingen made computer models of thumb bones from “a variety of ancient hominins” along with those of modern humans and chimpanzees, and used […]