I haven’t had time to provide answers on the previous article, sorry about that. Busy with preparation for the International Symposium on Pterosaurs, this year being held in Rio. Purely for the sake of adding something new (TetZoo podcast followers will understand the motivation, I hope), here’s some recycled text from Tet Zoo ver 2 [...]

Bored? Looking for things to do? No, me neither. But have some fun and look at these skulls — then identify them (taking care to note your identifications in the comments below). And then… … see if you can go that extra bit further and say something especially interesting*, since there’s lots of neat stuff going [...]

Tet Zoo readers with supernatural memories will doubtless recall the January 2012 article ‘Rigid swimmer’ and the Cretaceous Ichthyosaur Revolution (part I) [link below]. I’ll refresh your memory by telling you that the article was all about the PLoS ONE paper on Acamptonectes, a Cretaceous ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaur from the UK and Germany described by Valentin [...]

Any adventures about the more rural parts of the UK typically involve (for me, anyway) a lot of looking at the Rook Corvus frugilegus, a remarkable Old World corvid that occurs from the far western shores of the UK and France all the way east to Japan (it’s generally absent from the cold northern parts [...]

Tet Zoo regulars will remember the detailed montage I’ve produced that hopefully gives some idea of crocodylomorph diversity (Crocodylomorpha = the archosaur clade that includes modern crocodylians and all taxa closer to them than to croc-branch members of Archosauria like the aetosaurs and rauisuchians. Crocodylomorpha is basically equivalent to ‘Crocodilia’ of tradition; most members of [...]

Over the last few days, I and my friends and colleagues from the University of Southampton’s vertebrate palaeontology research group visited Lyme Regis for the 2013 Fossil Festival, a big, fun event attended by 1000s of people and by most palaeontologically- and geologically-oriented people in the southern half of the UK. There are stalls and [...]

My photography skills – if I can call them that – are pretty atrocious. While on a break in Wales recently, I managed to photograph a sequence in which a Herring gull Larus argentatus (one of our most frequently encountered gulls) swallowed a Common sea star Asterias rubens. Yeah, that’s right, get into the habit [...]

Time for a quick look at another temnospondyl group. Today, we focus on the tupilakosaurids, a group of short-limbed, blunt-skulled, long-bodied Permo-Triassic temnos. Ossified ceratobranchials, poorly ossified limbs and long and flexible bodies all suggest that they were fully aquatic though – like some other aquatic temnospondyl groups – their bones lack lateral line sulci. [...]

For over 100 years, a potentially significant dead cat has been sat in storage in a British museum. Specifically, the specimen – the lynx Ab4458 – has been at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery ever since it was added to the collections there in February 1903, and what makes it significant is that it was [...]

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 [...]