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Smilodon North of the 49th Parallel

The fierce predator Smilodon fatalis — a compact but robust killer that weighed in around...

First Nation Shell Middens And True Oysters

One of the now rare species of oysters in the Pacific Northwest is the Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida...

Zenaspis: Lower Devonian Bony Fish Of Podolia, Ukraine

A Devonian bony fish mortality plate showing a lower shield of Zenaspis podolica (Lankester, 1869)...

Oil in Water Beauty: Euhoplites of Folkstone

Sheer beauty — a beautiful Euhoplites ammonite from Folkstone, UK. These lovelies have a pleasing...

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Musings in Natural History—meant to captivate, educate and inspire.
Palaeontology & Life Sciences—History & Indigenous Culture

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A fierce debate is in progress. Human slaughter or natural demise....

Giant beavers, oversized ground sloths, and huge armadillo-like creatures all disappeared within a couple of thousand years — a mere heartbeat in geological terms. Was it just hard living on cold ice or were humans to blame for this massive loss? Scholars hotly dispute whether or not we were solely responsible for these extinctions. We certainly played a role.

Spotted Cleaner Shrimp









"Wash that for you?" If you were a fish living in the warm turquoise waters off the coast of Bonaire, you may not hear those words, but you'd see the shrimp sign language equivalent. It seems Periclimenes yucatanicus or Spotted Cleaner Shrimp is doing a booming business in the local reefs by setting up a fish washing service.

A surprisingly warm sunny morning sparked a return trip to the Cretaceous-Jurassic exposures near Harrison Lake, British Columbia. The lake and hotsprings at Harrison are an easy one to two hour drive from Vancouver. My work leads me a ways past the town exploring logging roads along the lake.

Without goggles you could easily lose an eye working the unyielding siltstones. Much of my collecting was spent wincing as small, bullet-like projectiles went pinging past my face… others making contact but not enough to deter my efforts. No pain no gain.
Afraid of  being eaten alive? Most folks are. Lucky for those living in Nigeria today the dinosaurs went extinct some 65 million years ago. Had they lived on, one of the fiercest meat-eating killers on the planet would be wreaking havoc in Africa.

Those frightening killers do live on in the fossil record, though the record is sparse. Evidence of 95-million year old therapods from Africa is quite scare making one think that each fragment would be treated like gold, this was not the case the first evidence of Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis, a newly described dinosaur from the Cenomanian of Nigeria and published in this months issue Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

 

Scientists from Sweden’s Uppsala University have pieced together a bizarre marine predator who trolled the seas some 505-million years ago. Hurdia, an extinct species of anomalocaridid, had a giant head, protruding hollow spike-shaped head shield and spiny claws for capturing prey. Bits and pieces of Hurdia have shown up in museums all over the world. Until now, much like their more robust cousin, Anomalocaris, they’ve been left unidentified or wildly mislabeled.