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 [...]

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 to talk about another recently published paper I was involved in: this time, the looooong awaited Journal of Systematic Palaeontology paper ‘A new leptocleidid (Sauropterygia, Plesiosauria) from the Vectis Formation (Early Barremian-early Aptian; Early Cretaceous) of the Isle of Wight and the evolution of Leptocleididae, a controversial clade’ (Benson et al. 2012a). Wow, what [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

You’ve heard of plesiosaurs (and probably the short-necked plesiosaurs known vernacularly as pliosaurs). But unless you’re a palaeontologist or zoology uber-nerd, you might well not have heard of placodonts, pachypleurosaurs, nothosauroids and pistosaurids – the other lineages that, together with plesiosaurs, form Sauropterygia, a major clade of Mesozoic marine reptiles. Here’s a much-simplified cladogram showing [...]

The Mesozoic was not a ‘dinosaurs-only theme park’. Numerous other tetrapod lineages were around as well, and there was enough ‘ecospace’ for members of at least some of these groups to evolve giant size and macropredatory lifestyles, and even to dominate certain sections of the Mesozoic world. It’s well known in particular that this was [...]

Notice to those who see that this article is incredibly long and then decide not to read it: here’s the take-home point… ReptileEvolution.com does not represent a trustworthy source that people should consult or rely on. Students, amateur researchers and the lay public should be strongly advised to avoid or ignore it. For the rest [...]