Christian Halliwell

This is super cool (both the study and the artwork). Link to the paper here: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Earliest long-necked sauropterygian Lijiangosaurus yongshengensis and plasticity of vertebral evolution in sauropterygian marine reptiles - Communications Biology A newly discovered Triassic fossil marine reptile, Lijiangosaurus yongshengensis, reveals that an exceptionally long neck developing more than 40 cervical vertebrae evolved in nothosaurs before the ri...

Wang, W., Shang, Q., Wang, J. et al. Earliest long-necked sauropterygian Lijiangosaurus yongshengensis and plasticity of vertebral evolution in sauropterygian marine reptiles. Commun Biol 8, 1551 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s420...

YouTube video by Apple TV Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age — Season 3 Official Trailer | Apple TV

Yes, the #PrehistoricPlanetIceAge trailer is out today...

The amount of AI generated art in slides at this conference, primarily used by older scientists, is killing me. Scientists please. Don’t use these ai platforms to make your figures or slides. They look bad and I have yet to see them meaningfully improve the message of talks.

The Case of the Tiny Tyrannosaurus Might Have Been Cracked

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.

YouTube video by Dead Sound "Hunted by Moonlight" | Dinosauria Series | Animated Short Film (2025)

The newest Dinosauria short film -- set in the early Jurassic Kayenta formation of Arizona -- takes inspiration from gothic fairy tales and horror. It fucking rocks, man

An image of Jane Goodall and a chimpanzee, from 1965. Photo courtesy CBS Photo Archive / Getty.

The naturalist Jane Goodall died today at 91. Hope, she argued, is not merely “passive wishful thinking” but a “crucial survival trait.” Revisit a conversation with Goodall, from 2021: nyer.cm/F55JtsS

The paltry fossil record of narwhals (Monodon) and the evolutionary history of white whales Narwhals are certainly among the strangest and most immediately recognizable of all marine mammals, owing to their fantastic tusk. Narwhals ...

NEW blog post! The evolution and fossil record of narwhals and belugas - the white whales! Emphasis on the surprising fossil record of belugas and the evolution of the bizarre tusk in the weirdest modern cetacean. 🐬🧪🦖 #whaleontology Read it here: coastalpaleo.blogspot.com/2024/07/the-...

Fossilized skull of an extinct penguin, shown from multiple views.

Large penguin from the Tangahoe Formation (Pliocene of New Zealand), a member of the same genus as extant king and emperor penguins: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... 🧪🪶 (📷 @atennyson.bsky.social et al.)

#ZAVACEPHALE IS FINALLY OUT! 🥳 Our first definitive Early Cretaceous pachycephalosaur! (~15 my older than the previous oldest pachycephalosaurs) And the first hand material for the clade! I can't tell y'all how much of a pleasure it was to review this paper! ☺️

I think it's worth asking the degree to which the near-wholesale wipeout of megafauna across large swaths of the earth in the Pleistocene extinctions might have led to similar shifts in certain places

This Crocodile Relative Was One of Dinosaurs’ Most Fearsome Predators

My latest! I wrote about a newly-discovered land crocodile the size of a siberian tiger, part of a larger story of competition between galloping crocodiles and predatory dinosaurs in South America that lasted well into the Cenozoic

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!!

Gray whale population crashes amid climate-driven starvation Once considered a conservation success story, the Eastern Pacific gray whale is now vanishing — a stark warning of climate chaos in motion.

Meanwhile, in conservation reality and #whales -

A good article by Sue Arnold in Independent Australia on the population crash of Western Pacific gray whales.

"The latest estimate of 13,000 animals is less than half of the 27,000 population ten years ago."
🐳🌍🦑🧪
1/3

See the latest update for Forgotten Bloodlines here! Get a look at some new screenshots, animals, and read about the status of the development!

t.co/osiJNC5Spq

20 million years ago, Moropus inhabited the forests of North America

elephant hiding behind branches

Dalén: Million year old mammoth DNA allowed to discover mammoth ghost lineages. Who thought mammoth species could hide? #ESEB2025
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03224-9

when the AI bubble finally collapses and everyone who spent a year smugly hyping it suddenly has to come crawling back with their tail between their legs, i just want to say i am not going to be the bigger person about it. i am going to be meaner than you can even believe

Manmoth hunter

How we feel looking at all the incredible details on our 55-ft mosasaur! ✨

#edelmanfossilparkmuseum #rowanuniversity #dinosaurs #paleontology #mosasaur #jurassicpark #jurassicworld

New bill aims to protect Washington’s underwater bull kelp forests Lawmakers seek to raise awareness of the plant’s cultural significance and its role in supporting ecosystems by naming it WA’s official marine forest.

New bill aims to protect Washington’s underwater bull kelp forests | Cascade PBS

Two juvenile giant moa (Dinornis robustus) run energetically along a beach, creating some splashes as they go. Small waves roll in behind them.

Young Dinornis at the Beach 🏖️

I just learned about Dear Fauna, a STOP MOTION, FELT animation about pleistocene.
It releases in just a couple days. Let's show it some love!

Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Ready for tiny birds from above the Arctic Circle? Our new paper on the Cretaceous origins of Arctic nesting drops today in Science. This project was led by @lnwilson.bsky.social‬ and features amazing fossils recovered by Pat Druckenmiller’s field program in the Prince Creek Formation of Alaska.

Yeah, they're really phenomenal (pretty much all the models in the new WWD are, honestly)

This is figure 1, which shows the taxonomic identification of the 173 bone specimens analyzed using ZooMS, and examples of the main categories of elements.

Humans may have been making tools from whale bones up to 20,000 years ago, according to evidence presented in Nature Communications. go.nature.com/4kePeD6 🏺 🧪

I think most of us who actually enjoy paleomedia rather than just arguing about it online are looking forward to the series, the amount of care and effort that went into making it definitely shows

Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution - Nature Analysis of a fossil trackway from the earliest Carboniferous of Australia shows prints of toes with claws, suggesting that the origin of amniotes was at least 35–40 million years earlier than pr...

It's out! We describe probable reptile tracks from the earliest Carboniferous of Australia. This pushes the amniote record back by some 35-40 million years and implies that the tetrapod crown group originated deep in the Late Devonian. The paper is Open Access. 🧪
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cover image promoting the new research paper "New perspectives on body size and shape evolution in dinosaurs", written by Matthew Dempsey, Samuel R. R. Cross, Susannah C. R. Maidment, John R. Hutchinson, and Karl T. Bates, and published in Biological Reviews. Image shows a 3D Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton enveloped in simple geometric hulls, accompanied by an artist's impression of T. rex in life.

Published today in Biological Reviews:

"New perspectives on body size and shape evolution in dinosaurs" - the biggest paper from my PhD (my favourite chapter, too).

doi.org/10.1111/brv....

Here's a thread outlining some of our key findings. (1/10)