When you read a story, you may occasionally wonder what the reporter went through to get it. About a month ago I arose at 5 a.m. to  accompany two wildlife biologists and three fisheries volunteers into the high country of Colorado in order to report a story that came out in High Country News this [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Good news: I’ve decided to treat you all to yet another article on temnospondyls. This time we look at several (mostly) Permian groups – the sclerocephalids, archegosaurids and their relatives – that have sometimes (but not consistently) been grouped together as the Archegosauroidea or Archegosauriformes. As before, I have to note that there are strongly [...]

Continuing with the theme of the previous article on trematosauroid temnospondyls, I thought I may as well publish another randomly chosen chunk of my grand, super-long temnospondyl review. This time we look at the trimerorhachids. While there are diverse and often conflicting opinions on the phylogenetic affinities of the many temnospondyl lineages, it’s generally agreed [...]

Long-time Tet Zoo readers will know of my various efforts to get through all the temnospondyl lineages. Alas, I just haven’t been able to finish this grand project due to my getting stuck somewhere round about dissorophoids (see below for links to previous Tet Zoo temnospondyl articles). In frustration, here’s a section from late in [...]

When the Mesozoic ended, it was inevitable that the lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians – the squamates – would inherit the Earth. For the last 65 million years, the world has been so dominated by squamates that we term this stage in the planet’s history the Squamozoic. What is life like, today, on Squamozoic Earth? Purely [...]

We’ve named another new pterosaur! Once again, the open-access online journal PLOS ONE hosts a paper that I and colleagues (Martin Simpson and Gareth Dyke, both of the University of Southampton) have published on a new taxon (Naish et al. 2013). This is the third paper I’ve published in PLOS ONE so far this year, and [...]