The Fossil Files

Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps the most famous dinosaur and maybe even the most famous fossil animal. It has long been a source of curiosity as to why is has such small arms though. What could the possible function be? This week we take a look at a new paper has taken a quantitative approach to this age long-thorny problem to investigate the evolutionary changes that might have led to such unusual a...

Digging up dinosaur fossils is a complicated and unpredictable business. But how does it feel to be one of the scientists on the ground doing the exploring? What can you do when you are in a race to find dinosaur fossils before they are extracted and lost to the black market? In this episode Susie is in the field in Morocco to report the trials and tribulations of the team's dino hunting seasons....

The Fossil Files is one year old! Thank you everbody for your support! To mark the occasion, Susie and Rob take a look back at the last year and put together some of their favourite moments to highlight the best of The Fossil Files (so far) The episodes covered are: Episode 10. Fossil Fails: A Precambrian beehive and dinosaurs on the moon (September) Episode 3. Is de-extinction a scam? (July) Epis...

400 million years ago, before the rise of forests, the land was covered in mossy carpets, loomed over by weird 8 meter tall columns called Prototaxites. These weird giants have long been thought to be some sort of fungus body, slowly digesting rotting matter. A new paper has taken a detailed look at some well preserved fossils from the Devonian of Scotland and reveals that this enigmatic giant was...

Cretaceous oceans have long been accepted as a dangerous place full of massive mosaurs and other predators. Now some new fossils from Japan have upended this with the suggestion that the "top dog" was not any vertebrate, but instead giant octopuses that were far larger than any invertebrates alive today. This has generated a lot of Kraken related headlines (and social media posts), but is everythi...

Are we alone? For decades a global effort has been made to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), but have we been looking in the wrong place? A new paper suggests that we should be looking for advanced technological civilizations that had access to coal as this was an important energy rich source enabling industrialisation. In this bonus episode, Susie and Rob take a look at the geologi...

Smell defines so much of animal's life from finding a mate, to tracking down food sources and avoiding predators. Genetics and behaviour can offer us rich insights for modern organisms, but what about extinct organisms? How did they smell and what was their ecology? This week we take an interesting paper that has found evolutionary links between the endocasts of mammal brains and genetic markers f...

Fossilised vomit can provide direct, yet disgusting, evidence of past ecosystems and interactions between long extinct organisms. This week we take a look at "the earliest terrestrial regurgitalite" from the early Permian of Germany. This prehistoric puke helps us to reconstruct who was eating what, including the Dimetrodon , the famous sail-backed synapsid.  This week's paper is "Early Permian te...

Getting a fossil species named after you is an unsual way to acheive quasi immortality, especially so for a species of human. In this preview of our second bonus episode we take a look at the weird, and often tragic lives of 5 people who have given their names to species of fossil humans, ranging from mad Austro-Hungarian aristrocrats to rampant imperialists and German pastors. Along the way we as...

How and when did mammoths go extinct? This week we take a look at two bizarre mammoth related "fossil fails". The first is some unexpected results from from the "adopt-a-mammoth" scheme, a fascinating citizen science project trying to find the youngest mammoth fossil to date their extinction. In the second, we take some time to consider the most bizarre hypothesis of mammoth extinction yet: did th...

How and when and why do you become a palaeontologist? Biology, Geology, something else? Childhood, undergraduate, PhD? Susie and Rob discuss the different routes and offer their advice and experiences. This is a preview of our first bonus episode. To hear the rest of the episode, support us on our Patreon https://patreon.com/FossilFiles

The idea that dinosaurs were all scaley beasts got a massive challenge in 2000s when a variety of feather-like structures were found in fossils in China and other places. An even greater diversity of weird coverings have been found since then, most recently an iguanodontian covered in spines. This week we take a look at the porcupine looking Haolong dongi and what this means for dinosaur evolution...

What (and when) is an animal? They are thought to have first arrived about 500 million years ago and immediately underwent an explosive diversifcation at the beginning of the Cambrian. When and how this important event took place has always been hard evolutionary problem to solve: fossils with the necessary preservation of soft-tissues are rare and limited. Two finds from China blow open new windo...

Sometimes the answer to palaeontological mysteries can actually be right in front of our faces, if only we know how, or where, to look. This week we take a look a two cases by the Fossils Files' own Susie, Rob and Jane. Firstly, we reveal how the eyes and skeletons of early vertebrates were right in front of us, hidden in Silurian Scottish fish fossils, but only observable when we applied high pow...

Life nearly died 252 million years ago in a mass extinction at the end of the Permian. It was long thought that it took 10s of millions of years into the Triassic for life to recover and get back to a 'new normal'. That was until a new and very muddy fossil site from the high Arctic revealed a staggering diversity of predators and tetrapods in the earliest Triassic seas. This week we take a look a...

Lead is a well known pollutant affecting human health over the course of our urbanisation and industrialisation. But what about before this? Analysis of a range of fossil hominid teeth from the Pleistocene reveals that lead poisoning might have been a ubiquitious part of our deep evolutionary history. Furthermore, lab experiments looking at the effect of lead exposure on human and neanderthal brai...

Having large body sizes conferred all sorts of advantages on dinosaurs, but it potentially made breeding a bit complicated. This week we take a look at some weird pathologies in fossil hadrosaurs (duck billed dinosaurs and friends) and what they might tell us about their amourous habits - do broken backs provide evidence of rough housing in the bedroom?  This week's paper is "Deciphering causes an...

Part 2: Around 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid barrelled into the earth and wiped out  ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs*. Debate has raged back and forth as to whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before this mass extinction or were still going strong. This week, Susie and Rob are joined by Prof. Steve Brusatte to take a look at what vertebrates were doing just before the...

Around 66 million years ago an enormous asteroid barreled into the earth and wiped out  icthyosaurs, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs*. Debate has raged back and forth as to whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before this mass extinction or were still going strong. This week, Susie and Rob are joined by Prof. Steve Brusatte to take a look at what vertebrates were doing just before the asteroid...

Artificial Intelligence seems to be changing everything, everywhere, all at once. But how will the science of studying the very old be transformed by the technology of the new? In this episode Susie and Rob take a look at the risks and opportunities for palaeontology with the application of AI: palAIontology. Can we use AI to find, identify, and classify fossils?  The paper's discussed this week a...

In the last of our series from the massive Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting, Susie and Rob finally manage to catch up for a gossip. In this episode with get a disgusting taste of rotting crocodile experiments with Stephanie Drumheller of the University of Tennessee, an insight into the Dinosaur battle bus education project that has been travelling the Mongolian steppe with Bolor Minjin o...

New fossil discoveries keep coming thick and fast, but we managed to sit down with the researchers as they present them. In this episode Susie and Rob catch up (in person!) on their second day in Birmingham and talk to the researchers tackling important transitions in vertebrate evolution: the transitions of moving onto land, into the sea, into the air. This includes Emily Hillan of University of...

The Fossils Files are on Tour! Susie and Rob are in Birmingham for the massive Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference which has made a rare trip to Europe. We will be meeting and chatting with palaeontologists from all over the world and bringing you the latest discoveries and hot gossip. On day 1 we join the Nanotyrannus craze and chat to co-author of that study, James Napoli of Stoney Bro...

A newly discovered fossil from the Cretaceous of Mongolia tells us an interesting story about the purported head butting behaviour of dinosaurs. Pachycephalosaurs are famous for their thick domed heads but it has been disputed how or when this evolved. The beautifully preserved Zavacephale rinpoche has a well preserved skull and dome but also loads of details of the body and tail as well. What is...

Cordyceps is a weird fungus that can take over the brain of ants and spiders causing them to go zombie and commit suicide in order to spread disease. Weirder still, some new fossils from the Cretaceous have directly captured this nightmarish behaviour for the first time. We take a look at these interesting fossils, their potentially shady origin story, and their implications for reconstructing evo...