Extinct Animal of the Week

There is an entire Class of animals that we have not really discussed. They are always right there when we look up fossils. We should take a...

 Growing up we often kept Rainbow sharks in aquaria. These streamlined pets were fast when they wanted to be and were fairly aggressive. The...

 During the Cretaceous, when the crushing Ptychodus sharks were breaking open shells, sharks were often not the greatest predators in the n...

Yesterday we went over a bit of the development of sharks and discussed an early group of sharks that has persisted since the dawn of recogn...

 The Devonian Era saw sharks developing and diversifying under the "rule" of larger armored fish like Dunkleosteus . Sharks diverg...

 Regarded as the first genus of shark, Cladoselache is a group of 8 recognized species, all from North America. These sharks are commonly c...

The body of Atopodentatus is fairly unremarkable in reconstructions. Other than the hammerhead face of the animal, its body is something we...

In Luoping County in the Yunnan province of China in 2016 the newest fossil of Atopodentatus was discovered. That fossil, as we have seen, o...

Two Atopodentatus restorations, both by Nobu Tamura. The first was produced shortly after the initial description was published and is, admi...

1) Minor correction, I had a typo in the name of Atopodentatus yesterday, it has been fixed though! 2) Now, please enjoy some background in...

We typically write about dinosaurs here. We then branched into mammals at different points. We sometimes even talked about birds, small rept...

From the Facebook page of Julius Csotonyi: A twist! On Sunday, join me in a drawing lesson on a rare modern-day survivor of the l...

Inkayacu, was approximately the same size as Palaeeudyptes   Fossil penguins were not always penguin "shaped", as we saw with Waim...

Waimanu manneringi ©Nobu Tamura We know a lot about fossil penguins. Partly, this is because we have a fairly large number of fossils from ...

We could probably all use some kind of interaction from outside our family these days. While we cannot really pat one another on the back an...

Hello all! You're stuck at home. You're loved ones are stuck at home. I'm stuck at home. I'll be working on lectures and...

Good morning! What a wonderful morning it is! Punxsutawney Phil came out and told us all that spring is right around the corner, which is a ...

Holotype as depicted in von Baczko and Desojo, 2016 The holotype skull of Riojasuchus is very non-crocodilian to the casual observer. H...

More paleontological discoveries were made in 1969 than just Deinonychus , though that is certainly one of the most famous of dinosaurs. A s...

Since the description of Deinonychus by John Ostrom in 1969 the "dinosaur renaissance" that was kicked off by this paper and the ...