Baby Killer: hunting behaviour of theropods

Pterosaur head crests

Everything people ask me about dinosaurs they learned from Jurassic Park

Lost to Science
I have commented on here before about the theft of various fossils (most notably dinosaurs) and their illegal export and sale. However it seems that for once the media has realised that actually selling tyrannosaurs at suction may not be a good thing and that the theft and illegal trade in scientific specimens is bad. I’m very pleased therefore to see this article in The Independent in the UK and I hope that this is not just a one-off and that other outlets pick up the story a

The Whirlpool of Life
So being eight hours out from the UK and 12 from the US east coast it’s perhaps no surprise that I missed (forgot) that yesterday was the anniversary day of the publication of the Origin. While I totally failed to celebrate, Scott Sampson did not and chose this rather auspicious day to launch his new blog – The Whirlpool of Life. Scott will be covering mainstream science education and communication as well as all aspects of nature and biology and not just palaeontology and the dinosaurs on which he usually works. Nip over there and take a look when you have five minutes.

Beijing Aquarium
Beijing is actually home to three public aquariums, but the one I’m covering here is actually inside the Beijing Zoo, though it can be visited separately hence the separate review. It’s also big enough in its own right to warrant a separate review since it can easily occupy three or four hours of your time. It’s rather new having been

To me – to you: directions and descriptions
Having covered the ongoing saga (though to be honest it’s less of a saga than a small novella) of the ‘cranial-caudal’ descriptions issue, it seemed an appropriate time to bring up the ideas of directions in anatomical descriptions. As I noted in the earlier post, the point about directions in anatomy are to be clear and concise and to provide an unambiguous definition of something to avoid confusion for the readers and researchers who want to follow what you have written accurately. It should be easy to see how people can get confused without being careful about t

Cranial-Caudal vs Anterior-Posterior
This is something I have been avoiding for a while as I know for a fact that this is divisive in the dinosaur / archosaur community and incidentally I’m probably on the minority side. However, regardless of the divide, it is important to know that the division in there and why. Although I have not really covered the issue of directions in detail before, the central idea that scientific writing should be clear and concise is something I have expounded on before. In short, when describing bones (or teeth, positions, rotations about joints etc.) anatomists use a series of words to accurately describe directions to make things clear and concise. Obviously terms like up, d