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 [...]

Sexual selection – the phenomenon in which organisms compete over and choose mates on the basis of desirable traits – is one of the fundamental driving processes of evolution. It’s all around us, seemingly explains an enormous amount of the morphological and behavioural variation observed in the natural world, and has been shown to be [...]

There are surprisingly few good books on the evolution and fossil history of birds: among those I recommend are Luis Chiappe’s Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds (Chiappe 2007), Gary Kaiser’s The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution (Kaiser 2007), and Gerald Mayr’s Paleogene Fossil Birds (Mayr 2009). In view of this, Gareth [...]

Here’s an old article ‘from the archives’. Actually, it’s two articles combined: both originally appeared at Tet Zoo ver 1 in 2006, and both are included together in Tetrapod Zoology Book One. I’ve made no effort to update the text (bar minor tweaks). If I did, I’d write about the various new Cretaceous fleas and [...]

Like modern birds, and like their close relatives among the theropod dinosaurs, the birds of the Mesozoic Era laid eggs and, we reasonably infer, made nests. But what else do we know about reproductive behaviour in Mesozoic birds? Essentially, we know very little, and by “very little” I actually mean “just about nothing”. A new [...]

The complex structure, development and growth of feathers can, to paraphrase one expert on the subject, be seriously damaging to your mental health. Feathers are just crazy, almost certainly the most complex structures to ever grow out of any animal’s external surface. Yet for all their marvellous complexity, for all the interest that people have [...]

Today I want to talk about something completely different. During the 1980s astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle proposed (with his colleagues Chandra Wickramasinghe, Lee Spetner and R. S. Watkins) that the London Archaeopteryx specimen [shown here: image by H. Raab] was a forgery, made by pressing chicken feathers into plaster laid about the skeleton of the [...]

Greg Paul is an independent researcher who specialises on dinosaurs; he’s well known for his popular articles and books and his technical papers, but in particular for his hugely influential artwork. Paul’s most recent book – the 2010 Dinosaurs: A Field Guide (aka The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs) – is, simply put, the ultimate Greg [...]

Time to recycle more old text, this time from my aborted dinosaur field guide project. Long-time Tet Zoo readers will know what I’m talking about (for more discussion see this article on ornithomimosaurs and this one on ankylosaurs). Jibeinia luanhera is a Lower Cretaceous toothed bird, named for the Hebei Region and Luanhe River in [...]