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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]