Editor’s Note: MSU China Paleontology Expedition is a project led by Frankie D. Jackson and David J. Varricchio, professors in the Department of Earth Sciences, Dinosaur Paleontology at Montana State University and Jin Xingsheng, paleontologist and Vice Director of the Zhejiang Natural History Museum in Hangzhou, China. This is the second year this program sent [...]

Last week, a very prominent artist in the paleontology community somewhat publicly blew a gasket. His tirade started a conversation that has been sorely in need of attention for some time now. At issue is a fundamental conflict of interests: between science and its tradition of cumulative knowledge, and the rights of the artists who [...]

You had no reason to expect a good weekend as you began a long-dreaded yard project. Come Monday morning’s office discussions of sporting events and parties, you would be nursing an aching back. But with a single strike of your shovel, your yard gave you a story to top any tale of drunken debauchery recounted [...]

It never fails. Whenever scientists announce the discovery of a hitherto unknown fossil species intermediate between two already known forms there is always one newspaper or magazine that calls it a "missing link". Score another point for evolutionary science—another gap in the fossil record has been filled in. I hate the phrase "missing link". It [...]

Hanny Van Arkel is a 25-year-old school teacher who lives in Holland with her German Shepherd, Janey. She enjoys playing the guitar and loves Brian May. She also found the first-ever voorwerp. Hanny is a citizen scientist. Hanny’s voorwerp (meaning object in Dutch), is a weird green blob spotted by Hanny in 2008. It is [...]

Welcome to the third (and final) article in my little series on the dinosaur(s) once known as Iguanodon. As we’ve seen in the previous parts, Iguanodon of traditional usage – Iguanodon sensu lato – has recently been blasted into numerous separate genera. As we’ll see here, while some of these taxonomic changes are likely to [...]

Iguanodon of tradition (or Iguanodon sensu lato, if you will) was a huge, sprawling monster, containing numerous species spread across about 40 million years of geological history. Welcome to the second article in this series (part 1 here). In the previous article we looked at the Purbeck Limestone iguanodontian Owenodon – originally named as a [...]

One of the most familiar and historically significant of dinosaur names is Iguanodon, named in 1825 for teeth and bones discovered in the Lower Cretaceous rocks of the Cuckfield region of East Sussex, southern England. Everyone who’s ever picked up a dinosaur book will be familiar with the legendary – yet mostly apocryphal – tale [...]

Move over platypus, a recently discovered dinosaur may have bested you for the strangest combination of physical features. Two hundred million years ago, a two-foot- long, beaked biped covered in quills scampered about an area that is now part of South Africa. The dinosaur’s discoverer is paleontologist Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago. Sereno [...]

As the Blog Editor at Scientific American, I come to New York City about once a month to work in the office, attend editorial meetings, and prepare the blog network for launch some time in the near future. This week, I was in town at just the right time to join our intrepid team of [...]

Fitting fossils together to assemble massive dinosaur skeletons is certainly no small feat. Fleshing one out—inside and out—from tooth to tail is an even more challenging undertaking, especially when the subject is an 18-meter-long sauropod. Experts in animal nutrition, sports medicine, biomechanics and materials science joined paleontologists to re-create a full-sized model of Mamenchisaurus that [...]

Some extinct animals have anatomical oddities that seem destined to be confined to the marginalia of history. Questionable characters, such as the single-fingered dinosaur and the flightless, club-winged bird, ultimately died off despite—if not because of—their idiosyncratic adaptations. Now, researchers have described a perplexing, long-extinct creature, this time with some dubious dental assets: large saber [...]

Although today’s awe-inspiritng African Bush Elephant (Loxodonta africana) might seem a mighty beast, it’s a fraction of the size of ancient mammals that roamed the Earth 37 million to 2.7 million years ago. The Eocene and Oligocene’s Indricotherium measured in at more than five meters tall, and the Miocene and Pleistocene’s Deinotherium likely weighted some [...]

Researchers have pieced together a set of puzzling fossils from a stocky dinosaur discovered in Romania. The newly described predator helps to flesh out the spotty fossil record of carnivorous animals from Europe’s Cretaceous. The dinosaur, Balaur bondoc, was a sharp-clawed theropod that lived among small island creatures when sea levels were high and the [...]

A rare fossil find of two young feathered theropods has revealed that these animals sprouted a much wider range of plumage as they matured than contemporary birds do. Researchers, led by Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, have described the specimens as Similicaudipteryx [...]

When Pangaea finally broke up, some 200 million years ago, the result was a lot of heat. Specifically, volcanism, as enormous flows of basalt burst to the surface, ultimately covering more than nine million square kilometers. It wasn’t just the death of a supercontinent; it was also one of Earth’s five major extinction events—and the [...]

Avian dinosaurs—aka birds—have a streamlined way of breathing. Instead of sending air in and out of tiny sacs in the lungs like some other animals do, their breath flows in a single direction through a series of tubes. A new study reveals that birds are not alone in this adaptation: alligators also rely on this [...]

A rare horned dinosaur known as Torosaurus may not be a distinct species, after all, according to a presentation given Friday at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Bristol, England. Researchers have long recognized similarities between Torosaurus and Triceratops, the main distinctions being that Torosaurus is larger and has an expanded [...]

Sometimes we just have to put up an image because it calms everything down. This beautiful Protoceratops digital speed painting by scientific illustrator and concept artist Ville Sinkkonen evokes quiet contemplation outdoors. A hazy day, and the promise of summer to come. [h/t to David Orr] – - See more of Sinkkonen’s evocative work: There [...]

I really don’t enjoy playing Internet Police. After this happened and this needed to be said, I don’t want to write another story about image misappropriation. About another brazen misuse of some science illustration. Le sigh. Oh wait, first rule of writing something impactful: start positive. Ok. Ahem. Once more unto the breach! In a [...]

Last summer I had the pleasure of going the Association of Medical Illustrators meeting here in Toronto. Among the speakers and session moderators, including E.O.Wilson and Jennifer Fairman, was a name familiar to anyone who is fan of illustration – not just scientific illustration, but of the art of illustration in any form: James Gurney. [...]

One of the most popular fields of science with children and adults alike is paleontology. And there’s a very good reason for this. Since the first fossil was recognized and found, it inspired imaginations to envision what the animal was like when it was alive. From the myths of giant cyclops to sinewy dragons, fossils [...]

When it comes to dinosaur art, it takes a lot to rise to prominence. The field is saturated with everyone and their brother who never lost their obsession with the terrible lizards they fantasized about as kids. So it is with no small amount of gravitas that Steve White makes this proclamation in the subtitle [...]

Following our SciArt of the Day tradition of having something silly on the weekends (we’ve only been doing this 3 weeks – we have traditions?!?) I bring you Raven Amos’s Cretaceous Critter Coffee Company, starring the lovely caramel-brown Tropeognathus that also features as Raven’s blog banner. This image makes me crave coffee on a hot dusty day. [...]

This bust of Dryptosaurus was sculpted by paleoartist Tyler Keillor for the Lake County Discovery Museum just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Tyler, a full-time paleoartist at the University of Chicago, is one of the many science artists taking the bull by the horns and diving into fundraising for their own work. He’s started a project [...]

Bioart at first seemed to be such a novelty. Artwork usually made in petri dishes by growing bacteria in patterns outlined by the placement of their foodstuffs seemed to me at first, well, a little twee. Like making a marzipan Mona Lisa. But the techniques and images are becoming more sophisticated, and with the humor [...]

Should an illustration of a dinosaur skeleton be considered as functional as a pair of jeans? Watching this TED Talk with Johanna Blakley recently discussing copyright and fashion, she points out that some creative industries have little or not copyright. The world of fashion. Automobile design. The tattoo design industry.  The reason, Blakley points out, [...]

Tyler Keillor (pronounced “KEEL-er”) is a soft-spoken, understated paleoartist whose work is anything but. He works at the University of Chicago as a paleoartist, reconstructing creatures that paleontologist Paul Sereno excavates on his expeditions around the world. When I met Tyler eleven years ago, he was working in a cavernous, three-story high cinderblock warehouse, with [...]

Mesozoic dinosaurs of several lineages famously possessed horns, frills, bony bosses, crests, frills, blah blah blah – you’ve heard all this a million times before. Pterosaurs were flamboyant creatures too. Why did these animals possess these so-called exaggerated structures? Together with Dave Hone, I’ve just published my latest missive on this issue (Hone & Naish [...]

It’s January 21st, meaning that Tetrapod Zoology is another year older and has now been going for more than seven years. Time once again to look back at the year that’s passed… or, the year as seen from my own personal, Tet Zoo-themed perspective. As per previous birthday events (or, blogoversaries, or whatever), I’m going [...]

The three talks given at the All Yesterdays launch earlier this month are now viewable online. I’ve been having trouble getting them viewable here at Tet Zoo: here’s mine (with a link to the youtube appearance below)… All Yesterdays Book Launch Talk – Darren Naish For John’s go here; for Memo’s go here. I will [...]

Two weeks ago I and colleagues published a new paper in the august open-access online pages of PLoS ONE. Led by Aleksandra Birn-Jeffery of the Royal Veterinary College, and co-authored by Charlotte Miller, Emily Rayfield, Dave Hone and myself, the paper is titled ‘Pedal claw curvature in birds, lizards and Mesozoic dinosaurs – complicated categories [...]

My latest book, All Yesterdays, is now out (Irregular Books, 2012; details below). Subtitled Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals, the book – available both as an e-book and as a hard-copy, actual book book – was co-authored by John Conway, C. M. Kosemen (aka Memo) and myself. It’s fantastically illustrated [...]

Today see the launch of All Yesterdays, and lately I’ve mostly been busy with preparation for this event. If you’re London-based and thinking of attending, you need to book here. More news about how it all went, and about the book itself, in a few days. Until then, below find a few slides from my [...]

Some of you will know already that John Conway, C. M. Kosemen and myself recently completed writing and illustrating our new book All Yesterdays, due out in early December (both in hardcopy, and as an e-book for Kindle, iBookstore, Nook, and Google Play). Skeletal reconstructions by the excellent Scott Hartman of SkeletalDrawing.com also feature in the [...]

Time for another classic from the Tet Zoo archives: this article first appeared on ver 2 in March 2009 and is republished here with a few additions and improved images. It is the contention of some that the field of Mesozoic reptile research is plagued with bizarre hypotheses. You may or may not agree with [...]

People have always wanted to know what extinct animals might have looked like when alive. Combine the science of anatomical and palaeoenvironmental reconstruction with the liberal amount of speculation involved in the imagining of animal soft tissues, behaviour and lifestyle, and you have the vibrant and ever popular field known as palaeoart (or paleoart). September [...]

Regular readers of Tet Zoo – especially those who have been following things since ver 1 of 2006 – will recognise hypothetical ‘smart dinosaurs’ as a sort of Tet Zoo meme that have been visited again, again, and again. Much has happened since things started in 2006, and in fact I’ve since published a popular article [...]