Ichthyosaurs are large marine reptiles that existed for most of the Mesozoic Era. The most familiar forms superficially represent dolphins, but some earlier ichthyosaurs were more eel like. They could attain huge proportions, with some genera reaching up to 21m long. They were active predators feeding on belemnite, fishes and even other marine reptiles! In this episode, we talk to Dr Ben Moon and Fiann Smithwick, researchers at the University of Bristol, UK. Both have…

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Geology, as a subject, has for the most part assumed that there were no fossils to be found earlier than the Cambrian period. In the current day, we’re better-informed and are able to find good records of life before the Cambrian Explosion. Despite this, the structure of the Palaeocast website, with different pages for each period of the Phanerozoic Eon, shows we’re still biased against anything earlier than the Cambrian. We are guilty of lumping…

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Christmas was not particularly kind for one titanosuchid. Published on the day many were receiving gifts and well wishes, this Permian reptile was given the bad news that it was suffering from a bout of osteomyelitis, a form of bone infection, at the time of its death. I have been working on a little side project involving palaeopathologies of late, the lovechild of clinical and veterinary medicine, visualisation techniques and vertebrate evolution. Whilst my focus…

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The 61st Annual Meeting of the Palaeontological Association is this year held at Imperial College London. We’ll be livestreaming a selection of talks across three days, so nobody has to miss out on this great event. Our schedule is given below, all times are in UTC. If you join the stream late, up to four hours can be replayed. If the stream is interrupted for any reason, please refresh your browser (F5). If problems persist,…

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Or what a difference a word makes. Words have meaning. That meaning gives them power. Two essentially identical sentences can have entirely different meanings just by changing a single word. In some cases, that word can change how a person sees the world. When I was in University, I was fortunate enough to work for the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology for three summers. All three summers, I was with a program called Day Digs. It was…

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Professor John Long is an early vertebrate researcher at Flinders University, Australia. He is most famous for his work on the three-dimentionally-preserved fish from the Gogo Formation, North West Australia. In this interview, Dr Tom Fletcher (who you’ll remember from Episode 76) got the chance to speak to Prof. Long during a field trip to the world-famous Burgess Shale. Prof. John Long surrounded by the fossil-bearing nodules of the Gogo Formation, Australia. These calcareous nodules…

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[This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.] A hoard of fossilised pterosaur eggs discovered in China is helping scientists gain a rare insight into the extinct flying reptiles. Newly released research into over 200 eggs and 16 embryos from the pterosaur Hamipterus, including the first computed tomography (CT) scans, eclipses what was previously known about these cousins of the dinosaurs. In particular, they provide new evidence for the debate…

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I have the great opportunity to write about paleontology. Paleontology is something I’ve always wanted to be involved with, but it’s something I never pursued academically. I have acquired several books on the subject that I have studied, and once I exhausted those resources, I stopped. Life got in the way and my dinosaur knowledge, beyond Jurassic Park, stagnated. I’ve since received my B.A. in Creative Writing from Southern New Hampshire University. From there it…

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