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Last of the Sea Dragons
A prodigious mass of bone, scales and flesh lies parked on a submarine atoll in a Cretaceous sea. Swirling shoals of scavenging sharks gorge upon it without ceremony. From nose to tail, the dead...
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Coming of the Amniotes
Steamy, water-logged swamps, primitive amphibians trawling the undergrowth for food and gigantic insects buzzing overhead – this was the image of the Carboniferous period (which lasted from about 360...
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Pelycosaurs
This post is a continuation of “Coming of the Amniotes” As the carboniferous period drew to a close, the tropics began drying up. The swampy equator-spanning rainforests of clubmosses, ferns and...
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Sauropods – Whale Lizards
The force of gravity – together with certain physiological and ecological constraints – holds in check the evolution of ever larger body-sizes among mammals on land. By becoming secondarily adapted to...
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The Paleocene: New Dawn, Old Mist
“And suddenly marble turns into animals, dead things live anew, and lost worlds are unfolded before us.” – Balzac, in La Peau de chagrin Note: A few terms may need some clarification. The Mesozoic era...
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Reigning Reptiles – The Archosaurs
Many great dynasties of reptiles rose and fell during the early phases of the Mesozoic Era (a hefty block of geological time, sometimes called the “Age of Reptiles”, that lasted from 250 to 65 million...
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Permian Apocalypse
Much of Siberia is sheathed in sub-artic grasslands, conifer forests and peat bogs today, but 250 million years ago it was the site of a volcanic episode of Armageddon-like proportions- great fissures...
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Therapsids – Part I
Introduction to the Therapsids 2, 3, 3, 3, 3. That’s the number of bones in your thumb, index finger, middle finger, ring finger and little finger respectively. The same numbers apply to the phangeal...
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Therapsids Part 2 – Terrible Heads and Food Webs
Generations of fossil hunters have visited the arid fields of the Karoo basin in South Africa in search of ancient life. The rock-layers of the Karoo constitute an invaluable storehouse of information...
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Therapsids Part III – Gorgon-headed terror
This post is the third installment in a multi-part series on the evolution of mammal-like reptiles. Time has turned it to rock, but despite the passage of so many millions of years, the head of a...
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Suggestions
So, I’m thinking of dealing with Mesozoic Sea Reptiles and then the Great American Biotic Interchange next. I’d be glad to take any requests for vertebrate groups (extinct or extant) or topics you...
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Flightless Wonders
NOTE: This post is about birds that lost the ability to fly and evolved to occupy ecological niches typically associated with big mammals. In the sections that follow, we will study birds as large,...
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After a very lengthy hiatus, I have resumed producing content – but now about a range of subjects in Science and History broadly (Paleontology still features!). You can follow me at...
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