Last week, I spent time at the Bahamas Natural History Symposium in Nassau, Bahamas. Seeing policy makers, ecologists, educators, geologists, and anthropologists…

Those poor tail bones, always getting shortened and lost during the course of evolution. A long tail is the default condition for…

Data sharing is important–it helps scientists to reproduce others’ results, add data to previous analyses, and otherwise maximize the impact of an…

Although we can directly weigh modern birds, we can’t do this with extinct birds–and we need to know body mass to understand…

“How heavy was it?” Body mass is not just an intuitive way to compare the size of animals, but it’s also critical…

(I tried to make the title of the post sound like a SyFy movie title, let me know how I did) Obdurodon…

There was a time not so long ago (thousands of years ago, not millions, which is not so long ago to a…

After a long journey through the millennia, fossils inevitably arrive in the present as damaged goods. Bacteria, scavengers, erosion, wind, rain, and…

Earlier this month, an almost 40 pound rockfish was caught in Alaska that was allegedly 200 years old. The angler that caught…

As promised, today I begin a series on repositories used for paleontological raw data. I will focusing on repositories to which data…

The Sierra Nevada mountain range is known for its gorgeous alpine lakes, magnificent peaks, and glacier-carved valleys. It’s home to five national…

Recently I helped name a new species, an animal we think is the oldest dinosaur found to date—if not, it’s the closest…