What might be my favourite fossil has been just published by Kiat et al. 2025. Years ago I saw a pic of this Anchiornis specimen in nat geo article and I audibly gasped.preserving not only the feathers but also the original patterns as well. I made this drawing on the spot. Maybe its time to do v2.0

We'll close out this #FossilFriday with the obvious choice of Nanotyrannus. I couldn't share this CT scanning session at the time (June 2023) but can now. @jgn-paleo.bsky.social brought the holotype Cleveland skull he had on loan, and CMNH VP curator Caitlin Colleary & I joined in the fun!

#2025SVP ”SVP is not afraid of the word diversity. Thank you very much.”

Thanks to everyone who came by my #2025SVP poster yesterday! Very happy to talk about a large chunk of my master’s thesis. Thank you to my supervisor James Parham, as well as @medenadragon.bsky.social and @wolpard.bsky.social for their artwork which helped to bring our animal to life.

Tomorrow’s the big day. Feel free to stop by my poster on the evolution of pan-cheloniid pelagic specializations! #2025SVP #SeaTurtle

And that's the end of that chapter. What a great success: the SVP Palaeoart Workshop.

The #DorsetMuseum is really great. They have original notebooks from Mary Anning and several famous holotypes from the area out for people to see.

Alright, now that I'm not on the road - full thread on our new azhdarchoid phylogeny paper and what it means for pterosaurs big (like this one) and small! 1/23

Soon... Very, very soon...

JUST PUBLISHED!!!! A major azhdarchoid phylogeny paper coauthored with @skyemcdavid.com - the fruit of years of work - is now out in @journalsystpal.bsky.social! New clades, reconstruction of size evolution, and more. Full thread to come soon! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Me a week ago: “It’s a whole family of T. rex. How wholesome.” Me today: “Little guy is so screwed.” #NHMLA #LACM #JordanTheropod #Nanotyrannus?

LACM 28471, the holotype of “Stygivenator” and possibly the only Nanotyrannus on display along the west coast. Turtle-loving human for scale. It’s very fragmentary (what you see is what you get) so the ID is tentative, but it lacks a subnarial foramen, which is a synapomorphy of Nano. (Circle)

So looks like I was right and there's various people crowing about how they were always right about Nanotyrannus because they'd seen some private specimens or their take on the data was best or special and not at all about how the weight of evidence had shifted now. It's personal opinion > science.

It's #Halloween, so here's some scary #paleoart of the dreaded MAMMALIAN NOCTURNAL BOTTLENECK HYPOTHESIS. Which of these Megaconus will survive - AND WHAT WILL BE LEFT OF THEM? (Image just uploaded to #Patreon, along with a detailed discussion of this idea: www.patreon.com/posts/142523...)

On this Halloween, a reminder that a sculptor included a Xenomorph gargoyle during the 1990s restoration of Paisley Abbey

This hatchling encounters a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex on a winter morning - 12 metres long and 8 tonnes. The little one will never attain such colossal stature - he has a gloriously different destiny ahead of him. #sciart #paleoart

An interesting quirk of today's taxonomic revision is that one jacket from the Jane Quarry, long assumed to contain specimens of famous species, actually contained what would become two holotypes of two distinct species — Infernodrakon hastacollis and Nanotyrannus lethaeus

The worst part of anything Nanotyrannus has always been the personalities. We got some cool science today but it sucks to see quotes from an bully, and a man who helped create the commercial vs academic tension that’s sent many relevant fossils to private collections, doing the “I was right” circuit

Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus coexisted at the close of the Cretaceous

I'm pretty confident that certain online people are going to be cheering about how they were right all along on Nanotyrannus. Their take will be that they were right all along and their arguments, based on private specimens of uncertain provenance, photos of things without scale bars, and ideas...

Lancian tyrannosaur diversity tripling overnight is cool and all, but I feel like the takeaway of this paper isn’t that Nano is now real. The takeaway should be that we were mislead into thinking it wasn’t real because all the “science” tied to it was bad or inconclusive for basically 40 years.

My latest for @nytimes.com! For 40 years, paleontologists have grappled over whether a small tyrannosaur — named Nanotyrannus — was its own animal, or simply a teenage T.rex. The debate has been ... contentious. Which is why it's so fun to finally be able to say this: Folks? Nanotyrannus is real.

Wonder what’s in here? If you’re at #2025SVP and would like to know, drop my by Friday poster in the Turts and Crocs space, board B301. I will be presenting my graduate research on Pan-Cheloniids, including revealing a new morphotype of Cenozoic sea turtle that lived surprisingly recently.

Watch until the end.

Very gothic fairytale, not just in terms of vibes but also story structure. Another hit by Dead Sound.

New paper today in @science.org: we date the Naashoibito Member (New Mexico) to 66.4–66.0 Ma, coeval with the Hell Creek, with important remarks on pre-extinction dinosaur diversity & regionalisation in North America 🦖🦕☄1/ Art: @nataliajagielska.bsky.social 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🦎THREAD: We just published something wild in @asn-amnat.bsky.social - lizards missing entire limbs not only survive, but some appear to actually thrive in the wild?! Let me tell you about the "three-legged pirate" lizards 🏴‍☠️ [Paper: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... ] (1/n)

"Tears of the Mountain", the 3rd 2025 graduation short from french Gobelins school, is online. Directed by Luke Ashworth, Yehor Bondarenko, Alp Kurdoğlu, Romane Talva and Ange Yajima. Full film >> www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB9J...

Sweet and beautifully animated story about the struggles of holding onto tradition and heritage. The use of a paleoart-accurate theropod as a spirit of old cultural myths and beliefs is also really creative, not to mention it looks incredible.

Been a good couple of days for extinct armored Archelosaurians. Giant (~4m) terrestrial hypercarnivorous crocodyliform Kostensuchus atrox living in a high paleolatitude environment at the end of the Cretaceous. Many surprises in that sentence. Also, epic animation! journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

It also highlights the incredible significance of Moroccan palaeontology. A very sad part of this story is that Spicomellus fossils - very likely parts of exactly the same skeleton that we describe - are for sale having been illegally poached & smuggled. I hope these find their way back to Morocco.

Out today in Nature is the most exciting dinosaur paper I've ever been involved in - led by @tweetisaurus.bsky.social we describe a partial skeleton of the UTTERLY BIZARRE Spicomellus from the Middle Jurassic of Morocco, the oldest known ankylosaur. (1/x) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

What an incredible animal. It looks almost like if a toddler drew an ankylosaur and wouldn’t stop giving it spikes. Very interested in what else comes out of these beds in the future. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Hi all, me, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and the amazing UK-US-Moroccan team are delighted to announce that.. we have a new specimen of Spicomellus AND IT'S WAY WEIRDER AND WAY COOLER THAN WE EVER IMAGINED!!

Babe, wake up - Xanthochromic nurse shark just dropped.. Caught by some sport fishermen out near Costa Rica (and released after some photos were snapped) Look at this beaut, how ORANGE!!

A basic attacking sequence for Auryn (class: Sword Priest)

Superman has its moments of clunk and mildly distracting story quirks, but otherwise it's a damned delight. 100% what the genre needed in movies right now: sincere, fun and unashamed of its roots. (And no, its textual message isn't confused - it just knows the complex requirements of resistance.)

In recent years, palaeobiologist Tess Gallagher has presented results that challenge ideas about sauropod dinosaur skin, and which have major implications for biology and appearance. Tess is covering this in her talk at #DinoConUK, Aug 16th-17th, Exeter! Go to dinocon.co.uk for tickets and info.

𝑀𝑜𝑏𝑢𝑙𝑎 𝑦𝑎𝑟𝑎, a new cryptic species of Manta Ray, is described from the Western Atlantic Ocean. The existence of an undescribed manta ray species has been suggested for over 15 years and is now formally described. 🐟🧪 link.springer.com/article/10.1...

These structures are also associated with a big vertebral “hump.” Most drepanosauromorphs also have this “hump,” so it could be an osteological correlate for the whole clade. This plus some unpublished stuff certainly hasn’t helped Drepanosauromorphs beat those “weirdest tetrapod” allegations.

Shri rapax and Halszkaraptor

Smithsonian-Led Team Discovers North America's Oldest Known #Pterosaur www.si.edu/newsdesk/rel... (Art: Brian Engh)

There has never been a sequel to Jurassic Park, but every few years, a bunch of pranksters pretend that one is coming and also that it's pretty good and worth seeing. Everyone keeps falling for it, too.