Call For Guest Bloggers!

Interested in writing at Extinct? Today's your lucky day!

For guidance and inspiration, here's Darwin with a lightsaber riding a T. rex. Illustration by Maris Wicks.

In the last year, Extinct has hosted a diverse and fascinating range of monthly guest posts (you can find them here). This will continue through 2017, so if you're interested in taking part, you should get in contact. Guest posts are standardly between 1,000 to 2,000 words (although longer peices might be considered), and we're very open to a range of styles, interests, levels of seriousness, and so forth. Extinct's regular contributors are always happy to help with writing and editorial advice. Blogging is a fun way of testing out ideas, and getting them into the public sphere. What's more, our mysterious artist will provide every guest blogger with a caricature featuring an extinct critter of their choice!

If you want to propose a guest post, or have any questions, get in contact. Adrian's handling the guest schedule, so best to email him on ac2075[at symbol]cam.ac.uk.

Onwards, Tyranosaur!

Fossilized dinosaur brain tissue found

The Geological Society of London has released a Special Publication announcing the discovery of fossilized brain tissue in an ornithischian dinosaur. It is unclear whether or not this tissue served as the seat of the dinosaur's soul, but we're sure that a Descartes scholar is bound to look into the issue soon.

Source: Yahoo! News

New insights into Ediacaran Fossilization

Tarhan et al have possibly figured out how those weirdo Ediacarians managed to fossilize. There's also a nice article about it here.

New Australian Titanosaur, slightly boring name...

Propat et al have just published findings of new work on Australian Titanosaurs which includes both the first cranials remains of a downunder sauropod and a new mid-cretaceous critter Savannasaurus elliottorum. The name could have been better.

Near the end of the Cretaceous, a dinosaur lay down in the mud . . .

. . . and left some really cool fossilized skin impressions. Found near Barcelona, Spain, these fascinating fossils were formed in somewhat the same way as more familiar footprints.

Fossilized vocal organ from a late Cretaceous Antarctic bird

A recent paper in Nature describes a fossilized syrinx, or vocal organ unique to birds. This one comes from a late Cretaceous bird that live in what is now Antarctica. It's the oldest fossilized voice box yet found, by a large measure. Here is the news item from The New York Times.

Dinosaur tracks incorporated into Ancestral Puebloan Architecture

Fir the first time, researchers document the use of a stone with dinosaur tracks in an Ancestral Puebloan building in Utah. The research was presented at the recent Geological Society of America meeting, but you can read about it here.

A fresh look at fossils collected by ancient Egyptians

Adrienne Mayor writes here about a trove of fossils, originally collected by ancient Egyptians, and now sitting in storage. 

Incredible dinosaur fossil permits incredible dinosaur reconstruction

A wonderfully preserved Psittacosaurus specimen from the Jehol province in China has yielded enough information for paleoartist Bob Nicholls to produce the "most accurate depiction of a dinosaur ever created." More at The Guardian.

Predatory Triassic reptile (not a dinosaur) found at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico

This animal lived at the same time as early dinosaurs, but was probably larger than any of its dinosaur contemporaries.

Fossilized food chain

This fossil from 48 million years ago captures three links in the food chain: a lizard ate a bug. Then a snake ate the lizard. Then the snake died.

3D Printing of Fossils

In fields like paleoanthropology, where there aren't that many fossils, and the ones we have are are housed in museums and labs around the world, digital scanning and 3D printing could change how scientists share data. It's now possible to print out Lucy's bones.

See the news story in Nature here.

Little pterosaurs persisted well into the Cretaceous

A new specimen from British Columbia suggests that small-bodied pterosaurs persisted a good deal longer than anyone had thought, and that small pterosaurs must have coexisted with birds for a long time.

Absurdly ancient stromatolites found in Greenland

Scientists are now reporting stromatolite fossils that seem to be around 3.7 billion years old, and 220 million years older than the oldest previously known stromatolites. (For perspective, just think of all that's happened biologically in the last 220 million years.)

Here is an accessible discussion in The New York Times.

And here is the original paper in Nature.

If this holds up, these will be the oldest fossils yet found. And they suggest that microbial life on Earth was well established a good deal earlier than anyone had previously realized.

March of the Trilobites

New evidence from Poland suggests that trilobites migrated in single file, like some living arthropod species.