B.C

Hello there after a year of silence. I intended to post on some of my misdeeds over the summer, but this unfortunately slipped my mind. Perh...

Awful Changes (1830) by Henry de la Beche. Here, de la Beche encapsulated the growing public and scientific concern posed by the fossil ...

The basic vertebrate body plan is a tube with a head at one end and a tail at the other. Over millions of years it has been ornamented with ...

In most accounts of evolutionary history, the first invasion of the land was by plants, closely followed by animals. Yet it is becoming incr...

The beautiful colours of corals come from dinoflagellate algae living within their tissues in a symbiotic relationship Ever since the ...

From nervous systems and skin to DNA and proteins, recent advances in technology combined with new discoveries and analyses of old specimens...

A cluster of mantid hatchlings on the underside of a leaf Some animal parents devote little care to their young. Many mantids will simpl...

The identity of the oldest fossil is hotly contested. As palaeontology is the science which concerns itself with the remains of past life on...

Faulted basalts at the mid Atlantic ridge Alfred Wegener proposed the theory of continental drift in 1915, but it would take several dec...

The stems of marram grass anchor coastal dunes to a great depth Smooth white sand is the look of an ideal beach holiday. Yet such perfe...

Lampreys and hagfish are not the most attractive creatures. Eel-like in form, living unsavoury lifestyles as carcass scavengers or parasites...

The phrase amber time machine, first used in an eponymous documentary presented by David Attenborough, perfectly captures the palaeontologic...

Words like agriculture and cultivation are strongly associated with humans. 10,000 years ago agriculture revolutionized everything from our ...

The position of the lokiarchaeota within the tree of life The evolutionary transition from prokaryote endosymbiote to true eukaryote is ...

Hairs perform a variety of sensory and protective roles in mammals While not a defining feature of the group, hair plays a vital role in...

The classic image of the KT extinction: plucky mammals emerging from burrows amidst a wasteland of dead dinosaurs The classic image of ...

A simplified version of the difference between allopatry and sympatry The branching of lineages produces the tree of life. In order for ...

1.56 billion year old eukaryotic body  fossils from the Gaoyuzhuang Formation Fossil and genetic evidence pushes the origin of eukaryo...

Organ preservation is now a well documented phenomenon in the fossil record. From the nervous systems of primitive arthropods to the reprodu...

The fighting dinosaurs is one of the most remarkable and evocative fossils ever discovered. Consisting of a small theropod locked in combat ...

An ironstone nodule containing a fossil of the Tully Monster Mazon Creek is one the most famous Carboniferous fossil localities in the ...