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…
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…
We humans use the euphemism for sex that “we like to get a leg over” but the first jawed vertebrates – the placoderms – they liked to get a leg in. They were the first back-boned creatures to evolve male…
Collecting fossils helps raise interest in palaeontology and the natural history of Australia, and many important fossil discoveries have been made by members of the public collecting unusual specimens…
In a recent paper in Nature, we described a strange marine animal, called Tamisiocaris. They were giants that swam in the oceans over 500 million years ago. They had strange looking appendages on their…
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…
The impact of European settlement on Australia was so massive that many mammals disappeared before anyone noticed they were there, but fossils from the past 10,000 years offer excellent evidence of pre-European…
Fossils can tell us lots about animals – their size, age or sex, which is mostly physical characteristics. Evidence about how they may have behaved is rare. But the 240m-year-old fossil dung that I found…
The fossil record of early humans is punctuated by gaps, voids in our understanding of all the transitions from the common ancestor of humans and other apes to modern day Homo sapiens. While working in…
Accurate copies of fossilised bones can now be made from the combined use of computed tomography (CT) scans and 3D printers, according to a paper published today in the journal Radiology. The technique…
A new study by Rebecca Pian, Mike Archer and Sue Hand, published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes the tooth of a new, giant species of extinct platypus. The fossil history of…
A spectacular new “missing link” fossil has been unearthed in China. The 419 million year old armoured fish, called Entelognathus, meaning “complete jaw” solves an age-old debate in science. For palaeontologists…
The sudden appearance of a range of modern animals about half a billion years ago, during evolution’s “big bang”, has intrigued and puzzled generations of biologists from Charles Darwin onwards. A new…