Geobulletin alpha

Laelaps is Making Tracks to Scientific American! 

After a three-year run, Laelaps is moving to a new blog

Jurassic Park 4: The Lost Cause 

Photo by Juliana Cortés, via Flickr. I don't hate Jurassic Park. I may have a complicated relationship with it, but that's pretty common. Even if Colin Trevorrow had announced feathered theropods would be part of JP4, anyone would be wise to keep their expections low for a long-delayed continuation of a franchise of such severely diminishing returns. If you're one of those who has no problem with naked dromaeosaurs in the next movie, more power to you: I hope you enjoy it. I really do! Andrea [...]

Laelaps is On the Move 

I can’t remember the exact date anymore, but sometime last month I reached my six year science blogiversary. I was just a directionless Rutgers University undergraduate at the time I started writing. I loved paleontology, but was unsatisfied with my college education, so I pursued the subject on my own time and used my blog

Carnivorous Neighbors – How Sabercats and a Bear Dog Managed to Coexist 

Prehistoric predator traps are wonderful things. From the Allosaurus-dominated bonebed at the Jurassic Cleveland-Lloyd quarry in eastern Utah to the dire wolf and Smilodon-filled graveyard of Los Angeles, California’s La Brea asphalt seeps, predator-rich fossil deposits provide paleontologists with a wealth of information about animals that were relatively rare in the habitats they stalked. After

Scientists Reveal Jurassic Forest’s Hidden Hangingfly 

At first glance, the newly-named fossil hangingfly Juracimbrophlebia ginkgofolia doesn’t look especially impressive. Found in the roughly 165 million year old beds of China’s Jiulongshan Formation, and described by paleontologist Yongjie Wang and colleagues today in PNAS, the insect looks quite similar to its thin-bodied, stilt-legged, long-winged living relatives. But when taken in context with

A Feast of Feathery Fossil Posts 

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the American holiday wouldn’t be the same without moist slabs of gravy-drenched dinosaur meat on the table. Of course, our species was not the first to dine on dinosaur, not by a long shot, but we do it with a bit more style than the alligators, lice, sharks, and other creatures

Great White Shark Ancestry Swims into Focus 

Few predators terrorize our imaginations as fiercely as the great white shark. The immense fish is sublimely attuned to an environment that is alien to us, and, despite the rarity of accidents, the nightmare of slipping down the shark’s throat

Eocene Big Bird Not so Scary, After All 

The reign of the dinosaurs came to a catastrophic end 66 million years ago. That’s the common trope, anyway – a holdover from before we recognized that at least one feathery lineage survived and proliferated after the K/Pg devastation. We still live in the Age of Dinosaurs – a 230 million year old success story

Pterosaur Takeoff Tussle Highlights Science News Fumble 

Earlier this week I received a press release about pterosaur takeoffs from Texas Tech University. Rather than launching into the air through a pole-vault motion, as paleontologists such as Michael Habib and Mark Witton have argued (check out the video), the email said that giant pterosaurs such as Quetzalcoatlus required a “10-degree downhill slope” where they

Smilodon the Vampire 

The North American saber-tooth cat, Smilodon, is a symbol of the big Ice Age animals that roamed the continent thousands of years ago. But the sabercat's gigantic fangs remain a

The Fall of the Carnivorous Mastodon 

Extinction sucks. Only yesterday, in geologic terms, did mastodons, sabercats, giant ground sloths, and their charismatic Ice Age contemporaries roam North America. Humans even encountered these beasts, but I was born about 10,000 years too late to see the Pleistocene menagerie. I just missed some of the most wonderful mammals ever to trod the continent.

Researchers Chew Over a Prehistoric Bear’s Diet 

Of all the bears to come and go during the group’s 23 million year old history, none had a bite more powerful than Agriotherium africanum – a ursid as large as today’s grizzly and polar bears that roamed Africa during the latest Miocene and earliest Pliocene epochs. In a new Journal of Zoology paper by

Variety is the Spice of Life 

This past week, I attended the 72nd Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m still on the mend from the science hangover. Still, while my memories are relatively fresh, I want to mention one of the important themes that ran through some of the meeting’s sessions. Paleontologists are drawing more information from

Paleontologists Reveal the Identity of “Predator X” 

In 2009, journalists heralded the arrival of “Predator X” – an immense, big-headed marine reptile said to have a bite four times stronger than Tyrannosaurus rex. The leviathan had only recently come out of the ground, and the researchers who discovered the aquatic hunter had not yet published a technical description of the beast, but news reports, a History Channel documentary, and even an unrelated schlock film declared the little-known pliosaur as the most badass predator of all time. [...]

The Family That Nests Together, Rests Together 

Fossils tell stories. I’ve written about this beautiful fact over and over again, but the multiple perspectives on prehistoric life afforded by even the most mundane petrified scrap never cease to impress me. Fossils are not merely individual facts of nature that educate us simply by their identification and accumulation. They are more than that

Lemur Headgear Helps Researchers Probe Prehistory 

Lemurs in fancy hats are helping researchers better understand how extinct creatures moved. Although “fancy” may not be the best word for the attire (sadly, we’re not talking about fedoras or bowlers here). As part of a new PNAS study, researcher Michael Malinzak and colleagues fitted lemurs, lorises, and galagos of the Duke Lemur Center

Great White Shark Diet is More Than Seals 

Late last year, while on a tour of California’s Año Neuvo State Park, I saw a shark attack victim lying on the beach. She was a Northern elephant seal, and looked quite placid despite the gaping, crescent-shaped hole in her neck. She bore the traumatic hallmark of the great white shark. Years of watching Discovery’s Shark

The Lemur That Was a Fish 

Fossils are not always what they seem. Megarachne, once heralded as the largest spider of all time, was actually a sea scorpion. The squishy Cambrian critter Nectocaris has been transformed from one of our early chordate cousins to an enigmatic invertebrate of unknown affinity. Tracks thought to be left by an enormous hopping amphibian were

Fossil Untangles Horseshoe Crab Mystery 

A little while back, I went on a tear about the phrase “living fossil.” We should scuttle the baggage-ridden aphorism – extant crocodiles, coelacanths, and tuataras are not “unchanged” remnants of an earlier era, but the last branches of amazing animal groups that flourished during Deep Time. I almost wish that I had waited another

Repost: American Lion, or Giant Jaguar? – In Search of Panthera atrox 

[I'm out in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for some late season fieldwork this week. Here's an essay from the archive, originally posted on October 24, 2011.] The Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits is a wonderful place. I don’t mean wonderful in the overused, everyday sense of “That pizza was wonderful”, or “If