The Natural History Museum’s plan to remove “Dippy”, the cast of a diplodocus skeleton, from its entrance hall, and replace it with a genuine skeleton of a blue whale has been met with outrage. The #savedippy…
The Natural History Museum in London is replacing its skeleton of the long-necked dinosaur Diplodocus – an iconic denizen of the main entrance hall for nearly four decades – with a blue whale skeleton…
My colleagues and I recently had the great privilege to announce a remarkable new discovery: a dolphin-like reptile that prowled the Middle Jurassic waters 170 million years ago. When you think of scientists…
Almost all natural history museums and recognised public collections of fossils have in the past relied on finds purchased from private collectors, and many still do. But the role of amateur fossil collectors…
Everywhere scientists look it seems like they are finding dinosaurs. A new species is emerging at the astounding pace of one per week. And this continues with the announcement of perhaps the strangest…
Some 220m years ago, the Triassic Period marked the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. But by the time the earliest dinosaurs were just starting to appear in the fossil record, it was distant relatives…
Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, first published in 1859, offered a bold new explanation for how animals and plants diversified and still serves as the foundation underpinning all medical and biological…
Some species of dinosaur were astoundingly enormous compared to anything alive on land today, which becomes obvious the moment you stand in the shadow of their skeletons in a museum. This remains one reason…
While a week can be a long time in politics, palaeontology typically moves more sedately, in keeping with its subject matter (the slow progression of the aeons). But one area of fossil research is seeing…
Spectacular transitional fossils, many from northern China, provide overwhelming evidence that dinosaurs evolved into birds and thus didn’t all perish when the deadly meteorite struck at the end of the…
That starling at your birdfeeder? It is a dinosaur. The chicken on your dinner plate? Also a dinosaur. That mangy seagull scavenging for chips on the beach? Apart from being disgusting, yet again it is…
Everyone loves a good dinosaur story and they don’t come much better than the dramatic dinosaur stampede found in Queensland’s outback. But did a stampede really happen? In the late 1970s at Lark Quarry…
A dinosaur has been found in Argentina which may have lasted beyond an extinction event that wiped out the rest of its family. The new species has been named Leinkupal laticauda, which in the language…
Life as we know it is carbon-based, that is, organic. These organic molecules containing mostly carbon and hydrogen are delicate to the ravages of time, relatively speaking. They aren’t usually preserved…
Say hello to Torvosaurus gurneyi, the newly discovered theropod dinosaur that lived in Europe around 157-145 million years ago. It is potentially the largest land predator discovered in Europe and one…
A series of fossil discoveries in the 1990s changed our understanding of the lives of early birds and mammals, as well as the dinosaurs they shared an ecosystem with. All those discoveries had one thing…