The Columbian Mammoth, the official state fossil of Washington, crossed the Bering Land Bridge into North America some one million years ago and made a home roaming the vast grasslands that…

Much of the island of Crete is Miocene and filled with fossil mollusks, bivalves, gastropods who lived 5 to 23 million years ago in warm, tropical seas. They are easily collected from their pink…

This week's friday fossil is Mesolimulus. Although it's admittedly very pretty, Mesolimulus is actually a friday fossil because, if you were to wander along the Northwest Atlantic coast, you be…

Using the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, researchers have examined two fossilized birds, Gansus yumenensis and Confuciusornis sanctus. Confuciusornis sanctus , which lived 120 million…

This week's friday fossil is Cheirotherium (or Isocheirotherium, whichever you want). Every year, thousands of geology students descend on the tiny Isle of Arran in the inner Hebrides. Its unique in…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is true of all science, but especially in palaeontology, where only a handful of exceptional fossils can give a disproportionate amount of…

I heard recently on QI that apparently there was a "vacant" position in a museum somewhere for a skeleton of a human to be kept, to be used as the holotype - the reference specimen of Homo sapiens. (…

This rather sorry creature can be found in a lab in the ROM, hidden away with some old CRT monitors, This guy is Hallucigenia, another fossil from the exquisite Burgess Shale fauna - a contemporary…

Firstly, I guess an apology is in order. Its been a hell of a long time since number 4 went out; I got rather caught up with other things and this series then languished on my list of half-written…