How Fast Was My Dinosaur?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Dr Rachel Kruft Welton
Current Palaeontology MSc Student

In 2013 we went on holiday to Portugal. It was blisteringly hot every day and sightseeing involved an effort of will. I was, however, not going to miss out on the famous dinosaur tracks that litter the Lusitanian Basin around Lisbon. We parked next to the Nossa Senhora de Cabo on the Espichel Coast and made our way over the cliffs, down a stony path. We were near two sites containing trackways: one called Pedra da Mua and the other called Lagosteiros. (more…)

Jurassic Tacos – A Beginner’s Guide To Thylacocephalans

Posted on by Rhys

I’ve previously talked about one aspect of my Masters project on this blog, discussing the poor benthic crustaceans of Jurassic Somerset. If somehow you missed that blockbuster entry you can find it here. Sorry if the ending has been spoiled for you because of all the conversations and memes it no doubt inspired over the past few months. But there was more to my project than what was scurrying across the sea floor, I also looked at the monsters floating above them. To understand them, you first must ask one question; what on earth are Thylacocephalans?

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Time Burton’s Dinosaurs Attack! – The Jurassic Park Rival That Wasn’t

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: James Ormiston
Palaeontology MSci Graduate / PalaeoArtist

We all know the story leading up to the summer of 1993: God creates dinosaurs, God kills dinosaurs, God creates Steven Spielberg, Spielberg creates dinosaurs, dinosaurs inherit the box office (other creation timelines are available). The titanic impact of Jurassic Park brought a head to the public’s interest in dinosaurs which had been bubbling over for some years.

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Spider Evolution – 3D Trigonotarbid and the Spiders from Tars

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Dr Rachel Kruft Welton
Current Palaeobiology MSc Student, University of Bristol

The story of spider evolution starts over 400Ma, when their eight-legged, thick-waisted ancestor crawled out onto land. The pre-cursor to spiders were chunky beasts called trigonotarbids. The earliest trigonotarbid fossil comes from Silurian rocks near Ludlow, Shropshire. Trigonotarbids were a successful group of arthropods, whose fossil record stretches from the Silurian, through to the Permian. Unlike spiders, they had a segmented abdomen (opisthosoma), which can be seen in the 3D fossil (Figure 1), and no spinnerets, suggesting that they did not make silk, or at least not strands of it.

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My Top Three Lagerstätten

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Dr Rachel Kruft Welton
Current Palaeobiology MSc Student, University of Bristol

Lagerstätten are fossil deposits containing exceptionally preserved remains of creatures from the past. Often soft parts have been preserved and snap-shots of organisms in life-like positions have been captured. The creation of such a fossil deposit is an enormously rare event, and as such, Lagerstätten have been enthusiastically studied.

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Shark Week: Could Megalodon still be alive today?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea

No.

As much as I would love to have seen and dived with this beast, the science is clear: Megalodon is extinct. Trust me, we would’ve noticed if it wasn’t.

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Shark Week: When and How Did Megalodon Become Extinct?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea

And so we come to the end of Megalodon’s supremacy in the Cenozoic oceans. It had a good run for sure (~20 million years), but unfortunately all good things come to an end. While everything about Megalodon is cool and warrants research attention (why do you think I ended up with 7 blog posts?), a key question of its recent science is when the last of these giant sharks finally died, leaving only its teeth as its legacy.

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Shark Week: How Did Megalodon Become A Giant?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea

This blog will be discussing some particularly clever recent work on Megalodon. And with it comes a new main player in this ball pit of research. Enter Humberto Ferrón, who I was lucky enough to get to work with on my MSc thesis [1]. He made quite a splash in 2017 when he published two papers of immediate relevance to Megalodon that provided an extremely plausible explanation as to how such a massive shark had managed to evolve in the first place.

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Shark Week: What Did Megalodon Eat?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea

As we’ve seen so far, there have been changes and updates to the scientific consensus of Megalodon’s taxonomic assignment and maximum body size. However, its favourite snack is something that is universally agreed upon in the scientific community. In another rarity, it’s something that’s usually portrayed with pretty good accuracy in fiction. Allow me to introduce a shark that ate whales – actual whales!

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Shark Week: When & Where Did Megalodon Live?

Posted on by Rhys

Guest Author: Jack Cooper, MSc
UoB Graduate / PhD Student, University of Swansea

While a lot of recent work has gone into when Megalodon went extinct (to be discussed in detail in Saturday’s post), there’s less work regarding when exactly this giant shark first appeared. But I can tell you this with certainty: no, Megalodon was not alive when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.

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