Serendipitously, construction workers in Colorado found a quite rare Triceratops. Here's the story from the Denver Post.
Artistic Shrink-Wrapping
This blog essay by Mark Witton explores the rise and fall of the artistic convention of shrink-wrapping dinosaurs.
SVP Meeting in Calgary
The Society for Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) meets in Calgary, Canada, next week, and the Extinct team will be there! We'll be holding a workshop on philosophy of paleontology on Tuesday, August 22nd. Looking forward to the conference!
Gold mining and paleontology in the Yukon
A really fun film about productive collaboration between paleontologists and miners.
How complete is the plesiosaur fossil record?
This new paper quantifies the degree of completeness of the plesiosaur record, comparing it to other groups. It's an interesting example of how statistical techniques can be used to assess the (in)completeness of the fossil record.
Patagotitan
The Atlantic has a nice piece on the now officially named Patagotitan.
Mesozoic mammals with adaptations for gliding
This new paper in Nature describes some very early fossil mammals that appear to have glided like flying squirrels. Here's an accessible summary of the research.
A Late Cretaceous Ceratopsid from Mississippi
This seems to be the first North American ceratopsid fossil from east of the Mississippi.
Avian hip morphology
It turns out that ilium length in birds--an important aspect of hip morphology--correlates with the length of the sternal keel.
Oviraptorid with a crest like a cassowary
Corythoraptor could be an interesting case of convergent evolution.
Origination and extinction rates in ferns
A new paper uses a large dataset consisting of thousands of fossil samples of ferns to try to suss out what might account for variation in speciation and extinction rates. Interestingly, the causes of variation in origination rates seem to be different from what drives variation in extinction rates.
Studying the chemical signatures of 200 million year old fossil leaves
It's not possible to get any DNA fro 200 million year old plant fossils, but it turns out that the organic molecules in the leaves have distinctive chemical signatures. In a recent paper, scientists from Lund University in Sweden show how to use these chemical signatures to reconstruct plant phylogeny. Here is a press release that describes the work. Here's the paper.
Dinosaurs of the US National Parks
This blog post offers a nice overview of the dinosaurs found on land managed by the US National Park Service. There aren't as many as you might think, but it's still an interesting survey.
The "Hippopotamine Event"
A new paper appearing this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology helps to fill in a gap in the fossil record for hippos. Fossils from Chorora, Ethiopia, provide new information about the rapid diversification and increase in abundance of hippos that occurred around 8 million years ago. Here is a report on the work in Nature.
Important Caecilian fossils from the Triassic shed some light on the early evolution of amphibians
A new paper just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences promises to shed some light on the relationships of early amphibians. It looks like caecilians, which still exist today, were around way back in the Triassic, and that they may have been closely related to stereospondylids. Here is an accessible summary of the research.