The Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group (PBRG) in Bristol uses the fossil record to study the history of life and how ancient organisms lived.

Major questions that guide our work concern the origins of biodiversity and global change. These questions combine analyses of palaeodiversity and the quality of the fossil record, engineering approaches to function in ancient organisms, the evolution of novel traits, and the relative roles of intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of macroevolution. A growing focus is on phylogenomics, the search for evolutionary relationships in the tree of life and the mapping of trait evolution linked to gene function.

The group has pioneered many research and educational initiatives. The Bristol Dinosaur Project focuses research on the Late Triassic prosauropod dinosaur Thecodontosaurus, the oldest plant-eating dinosaur. The work is yielding new information on the early evolution of dinosaurs, and it is the subject of a major educational initiative, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

From the beginning of 2013, we are proud to present our new logo, representing the combination of research interests explored by the palaeobiologists in Bristol. For members of the group, you can acquire versions of the new logo here.

News from the Palaeontology Research Group
		January 2013 - New research highlights influence of intraspecific variability on biodiversity studies A study of around 100 newly collected specimens of early ammonoids suggests that the number of species they belong to might have been over-estimated. Dr Kenneth De Baets of the University of Bristol, with Dr Christian Klug (University of Zürich) and Dr Claude Monnet (University of Lille), studied the intraspecific variability through ontogeny (development of an organism) in early ammonoids, which has rarely been attempted before. Ammonoids are ideal for this type of study as they hold a record of growth from embryo to adult in their accretionary shell. Read more...
		January 2013 - Multicellularity, a key event in the evolution of life Multicellularity in cyanobacteria originated before 2.4 billion years ago and is associated with the accumulation of atmospheric oxygen, subsequently enabling the evolution of aerobic life, as we know it today, according to a new study from the University of Zurich involving researchers now at the University of Bristol, and Gothenburg. The research, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, applied phylogenetic tree reconstruction methods to the study of oxygen-producing bacteria, so-called cyanobacteria. Read more...
		January 2013 - A citation classic in molecular evolution In a survey of papers published in the leading journal 'Molecular Biology & Evolution' from 1983 to the present day, a paper by Mike Benton and Phil Donoghue (Paleontological evidence to date the tree of life), published in 2007, has been identified as one of the 1% most cited papers ever from that journal, a 'citation classic', with nearly 400 citations in six years. The paper presented a new rationale for ensuring phylogenetic trees are correctly dated, focusing on exact phylogenetic placement of calibration fossils and use of appropriate, asymmetric probability distributions on their ages. Read more...
		January 2013 - Dr Jakob Vinther awarded Hodson Prize Dr Jakob Vinther of both the School of Earth Sciences and the School of Biological Sciences has been awarded The Hodson Prize Fund by the Palaeontological Association at its Annual Meeting in Dublin in late December. The Association is one of the world's leading professional societies of palaeontologists and The Hodson Fund is awarded to a palaeontologist under the age of 35 and who has made a notable early contribution to the science. The award honours Jakob's work on origins of basal groups of animals and on colour in fossils, including dinosaur feathers. Read more...
		December 2012 - Inside the head of a dinosaur A new study of the brain anatomy of therizinosaurs, plant-eating Cretaceous theropod dinosaurs, has revealed interesting links with their meat-eating relatives. A team from Bristol and Ohio, including PhD student Stephan Lautenschlager and Dr Emily Rayfield of the University of Bristol, found that the senses of smell, hearing and balance were well developed in therizinosaurs and might have affected or benefited from an enlarged forebrain. These findings came as a surprise as exceptional sensory abilities would be expected from predatory and not necessarily from plant-eating animals. Read more...
		December 2012 - Bringing fossils to life A new way to learn about ancient life that harnesses some of the cutting edge techniques used by palaeontologists to study fossils, is being pioneered by researchers at the University of Bristol. CT scanning and 3D printing allow palaeontologists to see fossils in ways they never could before, to study delicate bones and other ancient remains in great detail without destroying the precious specimens themselves. Now Dr Imran Rahman has brought these marvels of 'virtual palaeontology' to the public in an exhibition in Birmingham, and in an article in Evolution: Education and Outreach. Read more...
		November 2012 - New evidence of dinosaurs' role in the evolution of bird flight A new study looking at the structure of feathers in bird-like dinosaurs has shed light on one of nature's most remarkable inventions - how flight might have evolved. Academics at the Universities of Bristol, Yale and Calgary have shown that prehistoric birds had a much more primitive version of the wings we see today, with rigid layers of feathers acting as simple airfoils for gliding. Close examination of the earliest theropod dinosaurs suggests that feathers were initially developed for insulation, arranged in multiple layers to preserve heat, before their shape evolved for display and camouflage. Read more...
		November 2012 - And all shall have prizes... Congratulations to Members of the Bristol PBRG, Jen Bright and Phil Donoghue. Dr Jen Bright has just been awarded the Science Faculty prize for the best PhD thesis from the Faculty in 2012. Her thesis focused on ground-truthing finite element analytical techniques. Her thesis has yielded four published papers and she is currently a postdoc in Bristol. Professor Phil Donoghue has been awarded a highly competitive Wolfson Research Merit Award, a scheme that provides financial support for exceptional mid-career researchers who might otherwise be lured away by job offers elsewhere. Read more...
		October 2012 - New study sheds light on how and when vision evolved Opsins, the light-sensitive proteins that are key to vision, may have evolved earlier and undergone fewer genetic changes than previously believed, according to a new study from the National University of Ireland Maynooth and the University of Bristol published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr Davide Pisani of Bristol's Schools of Biological Sciences and Earth Sciences and colleagues at NUI Maynooth performed a computational analysis to test every hypothesis of opsin evolution proposed to date. Read more...
		September 2012 - The evolutionary origins of our pretty smile It takes both teeth and jaws to make a smile, but the evolutionary origins of these parts of our anatomy have only just been discovered, thanks to a particle accelerator and a long dead fish. All living jawed vertebrates have teeth, but it has long been thought that the first jawed vertebrates lacked them, instead capturing prey with gruesome scissor-like jaw-bones. However new research, led by the University of Bristol and published today in Nature, shows that these earliest jawed vertebrates possessed teeth too indicating that teeth evolved along with, or soon after, the evolution of jaws. Read more...
		September 2012 - Visit to the home of the Bristol dinosaur Visitors to the village of Tytherington where specimens of the West's very own dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, were discovered in the 1970s, had the chance to learn more about this amazing local resident on Wednesday 31 October as part of South Gloucestershire's Discover Festival. Discover Dinosaur Day! included hands on activities to find out how Thecodontosaurus - also known as the Bristol Dinosaur as the first specimens were found in Bristol in 1834 - lived 210 million years ago. The event is organised by the Bristol Dinosaur Project at the University of Bristol. Read more...
		September 2012 - Palaeobiology's 250th MSc graduate sparks first reunion The University of Bristol's Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research Group is celebrating the fact that 250 students have now completed its MSc in Palaeobiology, with its first reunion event for former and current Bristol palaeobiologists. The reunion weekend was a chance to welcome new members of staff, Dr Davide Pisani and Dr Jakob Vinther, and included talks from staff, students, and alumni, a CPD programme of new numerical methods, a tour and display, and a field trip. Liz Martin from Canada (left) was the 250th student to complete the MSc in Palaeobiology. Read more...
		September 2012 - Palaeontology student receives prestigious Fulbright award Rachel Frigot, who has just finished the MSc in Palaeobiology programme for 2011-2, has received a Fulbright Award to enable her to study at Johns Hopkins University in the US on one of the most prestigious and selective scholarship programmes operating world-wide. Created by treaty in 1948, the US-UK Fulbright Commission offers awards for study or research in any field, at any accredited US or UK university. Rachel funded her Masters studies in Bristol over the past two years by working as a science tutor for A-level students. Read more...
		July 2012 - Engineering technology reveals eating habits of giant dinosaurs High-tech technology, usually used to design racing cars and aeroplanes, has helped researchers to understand how plant-eating dinosaurs fed 150 million years ago. A team of international researchers, led by Dr Emily Rayfield from the University of Bristol and Dr Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum, used CT scans and biomechanical modelling to show that Diplodocus - one of the largest dinosaurs ever - had a skull adapted to strip leaves from tree branches. This research was rated number 77 out of the 100 top science stories of 2012 by Discover magazine. Read more...
		July 2012 - Skulls shed new light on the evolution of the cat Modern cats diverged in skull shape from their sabre-toothed ancestors early in their history and then followed separate evolutionary trajectories, according to new research published today in PLoS ONE. The study also found that the separation between modern domestic cats and big cats such as lions and tigers is also deeply rooted. Dr Manabu Sakamoto and Dr Marcello Ruta applied a range of numerical morphometric tools to explore the evolution of skull shape of extinct sabre-toothed cats, modern (conical-toothed) cats and prehistoric 'basal' cats (ancestors of modern cats). Read more...
		May 2012 - Ten million years to recover from mass extinction It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed. Life was nearly wiped out 250 million years ago, with only 10 per cent of plants and animals surviving. Recent evidence for a rapid bounce-back is evaluated in a new review article by Dr Zhong-Qiang Chen, from the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan, and Professor Michael Benton from the University of Bristol. They find that recovery from the crisis lasted some 10 million years, as explained today in Nature Geoscience. Read more...
		May 2012 - Pliosaur with a gammy jaw Imagine having arthritis in your jaw bones... if they're over 2 metres long! A new study by scientists at the University of Bristol has found signs of a degenerative condition similar to human arthritis in the jaw of a pliosaur. Such a disease has never been described before in fossilised Jurassic reptiles. The animal is the pliosaur Pliosaurus from the Upper Jurassic of Westbury, Wiltshire, and the new paper, published today in Palaeontology is the core of Judyth Sassoon's research thesis which she completed while studying for the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology. Read more...
		April 2012 - Former MSc student publishes the textbook Steve Brusatte, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in Bristol in 2007, and went on to work for his PhD at the American Museum of Natural History, has just published the most authoritative and up-to-date textbook on dinosaurs, with the title Dinosaur Paleobiology. This is the first in a new series of advanced palaeontological books, published worldwide by Wiley-Blackwell, and edited by Mike Benton from the Bristol group. Read more...
		March 2012 - Just so: Scientists name Dorset crocodile after Kipling A superbly preserved 130-million-year-old crocodile skull, discovered at Swanage in Dorset in 2009, has been described as belonging to a species new to science in a paper by researchers at the University of Bristol. The specimen has been given the name Goniopholis kiplingi after Rudyard Kipling, author of The Just So Stories, in recognition of his enthusiasm for the natural sciences. The skull was discovered in April 2009 by Richard Edmonds, Earth Science Manager with the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site Team, in the course of regular site monitoring. Read more...
		March 2012 - Size isn't everything - it's how sharp you are The tiny teeth of a long-extinct vertebrate - with tips only two micrometres across: one twentieth the width of a human hair - are the sharpest dental structures ever measured, new research from the University of Bristol and Monash University, Australia has found. David Jones led a study of conodont function, working with 3D models reconstructed from micro-CT scans, and showed they were the sharpest biological structures ever - they overcome the limitations of their tiny size by achieving exceptional sharpness. Read more...
		March 2012 - The cutting edge: Exploring the efficiency of bladed tooth shape Using a combination of guillotine-based experiments and cutting-edge computer modelling, Phil Anderson and Emily Rayfield, researchers at the University of Bristol have explored the most efficient ways for teeth to slice food. Their results, published today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, show just how precisely the shape of an animal's teeth is optimized to suit the type of food it eats. Read more...
		March 2012 - The history of ocean acidification Current rates of ocean acidification are unparalleled in Earth's history, according to new research from an international team of scientists which compiled all the evidence of global warming and acidifying oceans from the past 300 million years. Dani Schmidt, a member of the 22-strong team, comments 'Laboratory experiments can tell us about how individual marine organisms react, but the geological record is a real time experiment involving the entire ocean. Read more...
		February 2012 - Public invited to draw the Bristol dinosaur Bristol's own dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, is now the subject of a competition. The public now have the chance to draw what they think it really looked like as part of an illustration competition run by the Bristol Dinosaur Project at the University of Bristol. Discovered in 1834 near Bristol Zoo, Clifton, the Bristol dinosaur was only the fourth dinosaur ever discovered in the world. Ideas about what the dinosaur looked like are changing all the time as paleontologists find out more about its bones which are held at the University and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Read more...
		February 2012 - Mouse to elephant? Just wait 24 million generations Scientists have for the first time measured how fast large-scale evolution can occur in mammals, showing it takes 24 million generations for a mouse-sized animal to evolve to the size of an elephant. Research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA describes increases and decreases in mammal body size following the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. An international team, including Dr David Jones of the Bristol Palaeobiology & Biodiversity Research Group, discovered that rates of size decrease are much faster than growth rates. It takes only 100,000 generations for very large decreases, leading to dwarfism, to occur. Read more...
		December 2011 - Chinese fossils shed light on the origin of animals from single-celled ancestors Evidence of the single-celled ancestors of animals has been discovered in 570 million-year-old rocks from South China by researchers from the University of Bristol, the Swedish Museum of Natural History, the Paul Scherrer Institut and the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences. This X-ray microscopy revealed that the fossils had features that multicellular embryos do not, and this led the researchers to the conclusion that the fossils were neither animals nor embryos but rather the reproductive spore bodies of single-celled ancestors of animals. Read more...
		August 2011 - Rocks and clocks help unravel the mysteries of ancient Earth Research into the dating techniques used to identify the origins of the living world has found that fossils and molecules together are crucial to calibrate the Earth's evolutionary clock. PhD student Rachel Warnock and Professor Phil Donoghue show that the shape of the probability distribution of fossils close to a critical calibration point can alter the estimate of age profoundly. Their work points to the need for much greater care in future about constructing estimates of known and missing fossils in dating the tree of life. Read more...
		August 2011 - Getting inside the mind (and up the nose) of our ancient ancestors Reorganisation of the brain and sense organs could be the key to the evolutionary success of vertebrates, one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, according to a paper by Gai Zhi-kun, a Bristol PhD student, his supervisor Phil Donoghue, and colleagues, just published in Nature. The study claims to have solved this scientific riddle by studying the brain of a 400 million year old galeaspid, studied using high energy X-rays at the Swiss Light Source. Read more...
		July 2011 - Fossil jaws shed new light on early vertebrate feeding ecology With the evolution of jaws some 420 million years ago, jawed animals diversified rapidly into a range of niches that remained stable for the following 80 million years, despite extinctions, habitat loss and competition, say researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Oxford and Leiden in the leading scientific journal Nature. Bristol researchers Phil Anderson and Emily Rayfield used engineering approaches to jaw form and function to explore the dynamics of early jaw evolution,and the team found that jawed vertebrates surprisingly did not have an obvious or overwhelming advantage over those without jaws. Read more...
		July 2011 - The rise and rise of the flying reptiles Pterosaurs, flying reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs, were not driven to extinction by the birds, but in fact they continued to diversify and innovate for millions of years afterwards. A new study by Katy Prentice, done as part of her undergraduate degree (MSci in Palaeontology and Evolution), shows that the pterosaurs evolved in a most unusual way, becoming more and more specialised through their 160 million years on Earth. The work is published today in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology. Read more here and here.
		May 2011 - Reptile 'cousins' shed new light on end-Permian extinction The end-Permian extinction, by far the most dramatic biological crisis to affect life on Earth, may not have been as catastrophic for some creatures as previously thought, according to a new study led by the University of Bristol. The team studied the parareptiles, a diverse group of bizarre-looking terrestrial vertebrates which varied in shape and size. The researchers found that parareptiles were not hit much harder by the end-Permian extinction than at any other point in their 90 million-year history. Read more...
		May 2011 - The sea dragons bounce back The evolution of ichthyosaurs, important marine predators of the age of dinosaurs, was hit hard by a mass extinction event 200 million years ago, according to a new study from the University of Bristol. Ichthyosaurs are iconic fossils, first discovered 200 years ago by Mary Anning on the Jurassic coast of Dorset at Lyme Regis. The new study, published in PNAS, uses numerical methods to explore rates of evolution, diversity, and range of body morphology through the crisis. Read more...
		March 2011 - A night at the museum with the Bristol dinosaur People of all ages will have the opportunity to find out about Bristol's very own dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus, along with meeting experts to learn about Bristol University's current scientific research on fossils and dinosaurs. Dino-nite! has been organised by the Bristol Dinosaur Project, run by the University's School of Earth Sciences, in partnership with Bristol City Museum. Read more...
		January 2011 - Introducing Bentonyx Two Bristol alumni have described a new reptile fossil and named it in honour of their Bristol tutor, Professor Mike Benton. Bentonyx is now an official new genus of rhynchosaur - a group of extinct reptiles that lived around 230 million years ago. Mike commented 'Bentonyx is a squat, pig-shaped animal, with a fat belly, hooked snout, and inane grin, so I can see why they thought of me'. Read more...
		December 2010 - Record number of scientific publications by Bristol MSc students The year 2010 has seen the the largest number of publications by current and former Bristol Palaeobiology Masters students, totalling 20 - one 'public understanding of science' contribution, and 19 scientific papers in journals ranging from Science to Palaeontology, and Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society to Biology Letters. This brings the total of original refereed scientific papers by MSc and MSci students to 81, since the MSc began in 1996. The Bristol Palaeobiology and Biodiversity Research group overall published a total of 80 papers in 2010, of which the contribution by Masters students is 25 percent. Read more...
		December 2010 - Fucheng Zhang visits Bristol as Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor Professor Fucheng Zhang has won a 3-month distinguished visiting professorship position, and is in Bristol from December to March, to continue work on the colour of the feathers of fossil birds and dinosaurs. Fucheng's research interests cover the origin and early evolution of birds and feathers, and the origin of avian flight. His current research themes focus on the description of remarkable new bird fossils, including skeletons with feathers and skin, as well as eggs, and other fossils from the astonishing Early Cretaceous fossil deposits of the Jehol Group in NE China. Read more...
		December 2010 - New fossil site in China shows long recovery from the largest mass extinction A major new fossil site in south-west China has filled in a sizeable gap in our understanding of how life on this planet recovered from the greatest mass extinction of all time, according to a paper co-authored by Professor Mike Benton, in the School of Earth Sciences, and published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The work is led by scientists from the Chengdu Geological Center in China. The new site, at Luoping in Yunnan Province, has yielded 20,000 fossils, including some of the first reptiles, indicating the first emergence of a full ecosystem, some 10 million years after the end-Permian mass extinction. Read more....
		November 2010 - Rainforest collapse drove reptile evolution Global warming devastated tropical rainforests, 300 million years ago. Now, Bristol palaeontologists Sarda Sahney, Howard Falcon-Lang (also Royal Holloway) and Mike Benton report the unexpected discovery that this event triggered an evolutionary burst amongst reptiles - and inadvertently paved the way for the rise of dinosaurs, a hundred million years later. This event happened 305 Myr ago, during the Carboniferous Period. At that time, Europe and North America lay on the equator and were covered by steamy tropical rainforests. But when the Earth's climate became hotter and drier, rainforests collapsed, triggering reptile evolution. Read more....
		November 2010 - Engineer provides new insight into pterosaur flight Colin Palmer, an engineer turned palaeobiology PhD student at Bristol has now shown that pterosaurs were slower flyers than had been assumed. By a combination of model testing and numerical calculations, he has shown that these ancient flying reptiles were significantly less aerodynamically efficient and were capable of flying at lower speeds than previously thought. This meant they could land at slower speeds than had been thought, and so explains why they did not break their fragile bones more often. Read more....
		November 2010 - Student wins mineralized tissue prize Duncan Murdock, a current third year PhD palaeobiology student, has received the 'Young Investigator Award' at the 10th International Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Mineralized Tissues in Arizona for his paper on the 'Evolutionary origins of animal skeletons'. Read more....
		November 2010 - New prize announced for best MSc thesis A new prize for the best project from students enrolled for the MSc in Palaeobiology, to be called the David Dineley Prize, has been launched. The first award will be made in early 2011, for the best MSc thesis in the 2009-2010 cohort, as judged by the teaching staff and the external examiner for the programme. Read more....
		October 2010 - 'Junk DNA' uncovers the nature of our ancient ancestors The key to solving one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, the origin of vertebrates, has been revealed in new research from Dartmouth College (USA) and the University of Bristol. Phil Donoghue and colleagues show, in a study of micro RNAs, that lamprey and hagfish form a clade Cyclostomata, and they are both equally related to the jawed vertebrates - previous orthodoxy had been that the hagfish was closer to gnathostomes. The work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Read more in the Nature news report.
		September 2010 - Top dinosaur hunters are worst at naming The more fossil species you describe, the less likely the names are to stick. Edward Cope (left) named 64 dinosaur species, but only 9 of his names are still in use. This is as true of prolific dinosaur namers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In a study of all 321 authors who have named one or more dinosaur species, the most successful were those who named only one, as reported in a new paper in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Mike Benton. Read more in the Nature news report.
		August 2010 - Evolution rewritten again and again Palaeontologists are forever claiming that their latest fossil discovery will 'rewrite evolutionary history'. Is this just boasting or is our 'knowledge' of evolution so feeble that it changes every time we find a new fossil? A team of researchers at the University of Bristol decided to find out, with investigations of dinosaur and human evolution. Their study suggests most fossil discoveries do not make a huge difference, confirming, not contradicting our understanding of evolutionary history. Read more here, and on the Nature and Discover websites.
		July 2010 - Ancient reptiles 'make tracks' A new discovery of 318 million-year-old fossilised footprints from Eastern Canada reveals when reptiles first conquered dry land. The footprints were discovered by Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, when he was on the staff of this department, and were studied in collaboration with Mike Benton. They show key features of the amniotes, reptiles and their descendants, and are older than the oldest amniote skeletal fossils. Read more here.
		June 2010 - First analysis of theropod biting diversity A study comparing how carnivorous dinosaurs tore through their meat has found meat eaters munched using at least four distinct biting methods. The findings, by Dr Manabu Sakamoto, a postdoc at the University of Bristol, appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Sakamoto compared 41 species of theropods, and used biomechanical models to identify the four feeding modes. Read more here and here.
		May 2010 - MSc student wins prize for thesis Nick Crumpton, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in Bristol in September 2009, has just been awarded the Geologists' Association prize for one of the best earth sciences Masters theses in the UK in 2009. Nick worked on adaptation and morphometrics of the teeth of tiny Triassic and Jurassic mammals, and the prize was awarded for his application of innovative numerical imaging techniques and comparisons with analogous extant forms. Read more...
		April 2010 - Former MSc students get permanent palaeontology positions Former students of the Bristol MSc have achieved excellent careers in palaeontology - in museums, universities, publishing, and the media. We normally do not highlight their new posts, but keep a list of current jobs of former students where we can. Three have recently secured permanent positions - Isla Gladstone, as the new Curator of Natural Sciences at the Yorkshire Museum in York, Tai Kubo as Curator at the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in Japan, and Phil Hopley as Lecturer in Palaeoclimatology at Birkbeck College, University of London. Many congratulations to them all!
		March 2010 - JESBI funding The 'Jurassic Ecosystem of Strawberry Bank, Ilminster' project was launched on 25th March, with generous funding from the Esmée Fairburn Foundation. The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution's museum holds a unique spectacular collection of exceptionally preserved fossils from the late Lias of Ilminster, Somerset, that show exquisite 3-dimensional detail, and many have soft tissues. The funding supports essential curatorial work at the BRLSI and development of a substantial new research programme by Bristol MSc students. Read more...
		February 2010 - Island of dwarf dinosaurs The idea of dwarf dinosaurs on Haţeg Island, Romania, was proposed 100 years ago by the colourful Baron Franz Nopcsa, whose family owned estates in the area. He realized that many of the Haţeg dinosaurs had close relatives in older rocks in England, Germany, and North America, but the Romanian specimens were half the size. In new work by Mike Benton at the University of Bristol, and six other authors from Romania, Germany, and the United States, Nopcsa's hypothesis is tested for the first time, using numerical methods and bone histology. Read more...
		February 2010 - Humble algae are the key to whale evolution Diatoms, planktonic algae, have been key to the evolution of the diversity of whales, according to a new study. The research by Felix Marx, a PhD student at the University of Otago in New Zealand and University of Bristol, together with Dr Mark Uhen of George Mason University in the US, is published in the journal Science. The fossil record shows that diatoms and whales rose and fell in diversity together. Whales do not eat diatoms, but the giant baleen whales feed on krill, small crustaceans that themselves feed on diatoms. Felix began this project while completing his MSci project in Bristol. Read more...
		February 2010 - Ocean acidification is at fastest rate in 65 million years A new model, capable of assessing the rate at which the oceans are acidifying, suggests that changes in the carbonate chemistry of the deep ocean may exceed anything seen in the past 65 million years. The research, by Dr Andy Ridgwell (Geographical Sciences) and Dr Daniela Schmidt (Earth Sciences) also predicts much higher rates of environmental change at the ocean's surface, potentially exceeding the rate at which plankton can adapt. The work is based on studies of plankton extinction through the past 100 Myr, with a focus on the PETM. Read more...
		January 2010 - Melanosomes in dinosaur feathers show their original colour The colour of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper published in Nature this week. For example, the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles - precursors of feathers - in alternate orange and white rings down its tail, and the early bird Confuciusornis had patches of white, black, and orange-brown colouring. This research was rated number 64 out of the 100 top science stories of 2010 by Discover magazine. Read more... See and hear Mike Benton rambling on about the discovery, and read the interpretive web pages.
		December 2009 - Another bumper year for publications by Bristol palaeontologists The Bristol Palaeobiology & Biodiversity Research Group published 64 papers in refereed scientific journals throughout 2009, of which 11 were by current and former MSc and MSci students, 17 percent of the group total. This high total emphasizes the groups efforts to encourage trainee researchers to excel. Themes range from plankton to dinosaurs, Red Queen to biomechanics. In addition, members of the group published two books, including the major new textbook, Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record, and other review and popular articles. Read more...
		December 2009 - New research resolves mystery about pterosaur flight Did the pterosaurian pteroid point forward or inward? The pteroid is a modified wrist bone that had a role in supporting the propatagium, the front wing segment. A new study by Colin Palmer, a PhD student in the Department, and Gareth Dyke, a Senior Lecturer at University College Dublin (and a former Bristol student), using numerical modelling and aerodynamic calculations, shows that the pteroid could not have pointed forward, and that it had a more subtle role in varying the dimensions of the propatagium. Read more...
		November 2009 - Britain's oldest dinosaur to be released After 210 million years of being entombed in rock, the Bristol Dinosaur is about to be released, thanks to a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £295,000 awarded to the University of Bristol. The funding will pay for a preparator, who will work to extract the bones from the rock, and an Education Officer, who will coordinate engagement activities with the citizens of Bristol and region, both young and old. This substantial funding reflects the success of this educational and engagement project over the past ten years, and its promise for the future. Read more...
		October 2009 - Why giant sea scorpions got so big Palaeozoic eurypterids were remarkable for their huge size. It had been thought that these predators became ever larger in an 'arms race' with their prey, the heavily armnoured fishes, or that their size increase was enabled by extra-high levels of oxygen in the atmosphere at the time. New work by MSc student James Lamsdell and Dr Simon Braddy shows that both views are correct: one eurypterid lineage became large to prey on the armoured fishes, and the other because of enhanced oxygen. The work is published today in Biology Letters. Read more...
		September 2009 - More than 1100 vertebrate palaeontologists in Bristol Over 1,100 paleontologists from all over the world arrived in Bristol this week for an international conference. For the first time since its foundation in 1940, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) is holding its annual meeting outside the Americas. The meeting was widely reported in the press, as was the inspirational lecture by Sir David Attenborough about Wallace, Darwin, and the birds of paradise. Hot topic of the week was the announcement of the new Jurassic dinosaur Anchiornis, the oldest feathered animal yet reported, 5 to 10 million years older than Archaeopteryx.
		September 2009 - Fossil water scorpion was ancestor of giant sweep-feeders New finds of a fossil water scorpion that lived in rivers around Bristol some 370 million years ago have shown Bristol palaeontologists what the animal looked like and how it was related to other eurypterids. Work by Dr Simon Braddy and James Lamsdell from Bristol,and colleague Dr Erik Tetlie from Norway, is published in the journal Palaeontology. Read more...
		September 2009 - Reptiles stood upright after mass extinction Having studied fossil tracks of reptiles from below and above the end-Permian mass extinction boundary, Prof Mike Benton and former MSc Palaeobiology student Tai Kubo found that medium- and large-sized reptiles changed from walking with a sprawling gait, to walking with their legs tucked under their bodies. This happened across the crisis boundary, whereas evidence from skeletal fossils had previously suggested the transition took some 20-30 million years, through much of the Triassic. Read more...
		September 2009 - No universal driver for plankton evolution During his MSc, Palaeobiology student Ben Kotrc analysed the relative importance of abiotic versus biotic effect on the evolution of marine plankton. The results of the work, supervised by Dr Daniela Schmidt and recently published in PNAS, show that both competition with other organisms and long term climatic changes influence evolutionary change in radiolarians. Read more...
		July 2009 - Glimpses of a distant past An international team of 14 vertebrate palaeontologists (from Australia, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Morocco, and Slovak Republic) have joined forces to publish state-of-the-art research on various groups of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic limbed vertebrates in a volume co-edited by Dr Marcello Ruta. These include the first land animals, and help us document the important transition from fins to limbs. Read more...
		June 2009 - New research on early mammals Two MSc Palaeobiology students in the Department of Earth Sciences have had notable successes in their work on the habits of some of the earliest mammals to have lived, some two hundred million years ago. Nick Crumpton and Kelly Richards are studying the fossilised remains of animals from the Triassic and Jurassic periods, found in ancient caves in the Bristol area, applying innovative new research techniques. Nick has been honoured with a 'best paper' prize, and Kelly has raised funding for her advanced CT-scanning work. Read more...
		June 2009 - Palaeobiology Masters student wins prizes Sarah Keenan, an MSc student in Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences, has been awarded a research grant by the Geological Society of America to fund field work in Montana and Texas. This is one of several awards she has accumulated during her year in Bristol: others include some $2000 from the Geological Society of America, and a grant from the University of Bristol Alumni Fund, all to cover costs of field work and laboratory geochemical analyses. Read more...
		May 2009 - Fossil magnetism and the end-Permian mass extinction Were major extinction events real biological catastrophes or were they merely the result of gaps in the fossil record? Research by a team of geologists from the Universities of Bristol, Plymouth, and Saratov State in Russia, has shed new light on the debate. A supposed gap in the Russian latest Permian red beds, just below the Permo-Triassic boundary, is much smaller than had been thought, and so the sediments provide a relatively complete picture of the sequence of events. Read more...
		February 2009 - Evolution: the Red Queen or the Court Jester? Evolution may be dominated by biotic factors, (sometimes called the 'Red Queen' view of evolution, after the Red Queen in Alice through the Looking-Glass), or abiotic factors, as in the Court Jester model, or a mixture of both. In a review article in the journal Science this week, Mike Benton argues that viewed close up, evolution is all about biotic interactions in ecosystems (the Red Queen model), but when seen from further away, the large patterns of biodiversity are driven by the physical environment (the Court Jester model). Read more...
		November 2008 - The fossil record of whales, and other marine mammals Felix Marx, a fourth year student in the Department of Earth Sciences has just published his first paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, a journal of international significance. Felix looked at the fossil records of whales, seals, and sea cows, and compared the fossil data to the availability of appropriate rock; he finds evidence for some geological control of the fossil record signal, but enough of a biological signal emerges to be used for evolutionary studies. Read more...
		October 2008 - Major new book on the natural world In a new book, published this month, leading scientists from around the world explore 'Seventy Mysteries of the Natural World'. The book, edited by Mike Benton, and with contribution from himself, Phil Donoghue, and others in Bristol, consists of 304 lavishly illustrated pages on major themes of current research on origins, the Earth, evolution, plants & animals, geographic distributions, animal behaviour, and climate change the future. The book is available in US, UK, German, and Dutch editions so far. Book details for people in the UK and in North America. Sample text here. The editor rambles on about the book here.
		September 2008 - Mass extinctions and the slow rise of the dinosaurs Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems, according to new research published this week. Reporting in Biology Letters, Steve Brusatte, Professor Michael Benton, and colleagues at the University of Bristol show that dinosaurs did not proliferate immediately after they originated, but that their rise was a slow and complicated event, and driven by two mass extinctions. Read more...
		September 2008 - What's in a [dinosaur] name? A new species of dinosaur is named somewhere in the world every two weeks. But are they all new species, or do the newly-discovered bones really belong to a dinosaur already identified? Recent studies on dinosaurs have shown that the error rate may be as high as 50 per cent. But new work by Mike Benton shows that things may be improving - most dinosaurs are now named from more-or-less complete skeletons, whereas, before 1960, most were named from isolated pieces - and so the risk of making a mistake was much higher. The work is published today in Biology Letters. Read more...
		September 2008 - First numerical study of dinosaurian origins A new study shows that the dinosaurs originated in two steps, and that they did not compete in a straghtforward way with precursor groups. Steve Brusatte, while an MSc student in the Department, worked with Mike Benton, Marcello Ruta, and Graeme Lloyd to investigate the disparity and morphospace occupation, or overall variability, of dinosaurs and their main competitors, the crurotarsans, through the Late Triassic. The dinosaurs took over some herbivore niches, but then remained at low disparity for 25 million years, before the majority of crurotarsans died out. Read more...
		September 2008 - Global warming wiped out the first rainforests Addressing the British Association's Festival of Science in Liverpool this week, Dr Howard Falcon Lang talked how about global warming led to the demise of the first rainforests 300 million years ago and what that might mean for the future of rainforests on our planet. Read the BBC report and interview and further details.
		July 2008 - Dinosaurs were running out of steam... A new numerical study by palaeontologists in Bristol, and elsewhere, shows that dinosaurs did not participate in the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution, the time 120-100 million years ago, when flowering plants, insects, and vertebrates were evolving explosively. In the study, a new supertree of dinsoaurs was tested numerically to establish times of unusually high rates of diversification: dinosaurs had done all their evolving in the Triassic and Early Jurassic. Read more..., and see the details
		July 2008 - Was it a bird or was it a plane? Interdisciplinary studies involving Bristol's departments of Earth Sciences and Aerospace Engineering have given a better understanding of the way that kuehneosaurs - a group of extinct reptiles - used their ribs to fly. Koen Stein built models and tested them in a wind tunnel whilst he was studying for an MSc in Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences. Read more...
		May 2008 - Two elite new research fellowships for Bristol palaeontologists The Department of Earth Sciences has secured three prestigious Advanced Research Fellowships worth a total of £1.7 million in the National Environment Research Council's (NERC) latest funding round. Two of the three new research fellows are palaeontologists, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang and Dr Marcello Ruta. Each year, NERC generally award seven or eight Advanced Research Fellowships, so Bristol has done remarkably well to secure three of the national quota. The Fellowships will support Falcon-Lang's work on Carboniferous palaeoclimates and Ruta's research on the evolutionary dynamics of tetrapods. The Fellowships each lasts for five years. Read more...
		May 2008 - New fossil bird from China In a collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, the remarkable new fossil bird Eoconfuciusornis zhengi has just been named from the Dabeigou Formation of Liaoning Province, China. In an article in Science in China, D: Earth Sciences, the authors, Dr Zhang Fucheng, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Bristol when he did the work, together with Professor Zhou Zhonghe of the IVPP and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol, show that Eoconfuciusornis is an important link in our understanding of the evolution of flight, between the older Archaeopteryx and the younger confuciusornithids. Read more...
		April 2008 - Professor Mike Benton elected to elite Fellowship Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology, has been elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh - a recognition of academic excellence. Read more
		April 2008 - New edition of book on the Earth's greatest mass extinction The greatest mass extinction of all time occurred 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period. In this cataclysm, at least ninety per cent of life was destroyed, both on land, including sabre-toothed reptiles and their rhinoceros-sized prey, and in the sea. Michael Benton's book about this catastrophe "When Life Nearly Died: the greatest mass extinction of all time" has been published in paperback this week. Read more..., and find out more about the book here.
		February 2008 - Bristol MSc student names two new dinosaurs from North Africa MSc student Steve Brusatte, and his former supervisor, Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago, describe two new dinosaurs, Kryptops, the oldest abelisauroid theropod, and Eocarcharia, the oldest carcharodontosaurid theropod, both from Niger in the Sahara, and both indicating the origins of their respective groups in Africa and surround lands. Read more...
		February 2008 - Evolving complexity out of 'junk DNA' Phil Donoghue is co-author on a study that shows how 'junk DNA' may provide clues about the origin multicelled animals. New analyses of the DNA of living fishes and their spineless relatives such as the seq squirts shows that vertebrates have a whole array of new genes, especially micro RNAs, that were key to the development of new organ systems. Read more...
		January 2008 - Recovering from the largest mass extinction of all time The largest mass extinction of time, at the end of the Permian 25 million years ago, wiped out most of life. So far, researchers have observed that life seemed to recover quite rapidly: in individual faunas, species numbers were restored sometimes in 1-5 million years. A new ecological study by Sarda Sahney and Mike Benton shows, however, that full ecosystem complexity took at least 30 million years to recover. Read more...
		January 2008 - Working out the mechanics of the crocodile-skulled dinosaurs An unusual British dinosaur, Baryonyx, has been shown to have a skull that functioned like a fish-eating crocodile. It also possessed two huge hand claws, perhaps used as grappling hooks to lift fish from the water. Emily Rayfield used finite element analysis to assess stresses and strains in the unusual long narrow snout of the spinosaurids to assess different postulated feeding functions. Read more...
		January 2008 - Pygmy dinosaur inhabited Bristol's tropical islands David Whiteside and John Marshall, who both completed PhDs in the Department in the 1980s, have come back to retread their old haunts. In combined work, they have re-studied the Tytherington fissures, Late Triassic fossil- bearing sediments from ancient cave systems. They confirm the age of these cave systems from the rich palynoflora, and that the Bristol dinosaur, Thecodontosaurus lived on a system of subtropical islands. Read more...
		December 2007 - Bristol MSc student identifies gigantic new dinosaur Steve Brusatte, who has just completed the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology, has described a new species of Carcharodontosaurus, a huge predator from Morocco. Carcharodontosaurus roamed North Africa 100 million years ago, and it was larger than Tyrannosaurus rex. Read more...
		November 2007 - Giant fossil sea scorpion A 390 million year old claw is shown to belong to an ancient arthropod that was two and a half metres long. The claw, measuring 46 centimetres was found in the Devonian of Germany, and has been identified as coming from the eurypterid Jaekelopterus, and is described this week by Simon Braddy and Markus Poschmann... Read more...
		October 2007 - Bristol palaeontologist discovers earliest evidence for reptiles A new find of fossil footprints from the Mid Carboniferous of Nova Scotia has pushed the date of origin of reptiles back a few million years. The new footprints, described by Howard Falcon-Lang and Mike Benton from the Department of Earth Sciences show features characteristic of reptiles, rather than amphibians... Read more...
		April 2007 - Earth's first rainforest is unearthed A spectacular fossilised forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth's first rainforests. The 300-million-year-old forest is composed of a bizarre mixture of extinct plants: abundant club mosses, more than 40 metres high, towering over a sub-canopy of tree ferns, intermixed with shrubs and tree-sized horsetails. Read more...
		January 2007 - New protocol for dating the tree of life Mike Benton and Phil Donoghue present a new protocol for dating the tree of life in a paper just published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. In this, they argue that fossils can provide only minimum constraints on the ages of branching points in the trees, and maximum constraints are less well defined. Modern algorithms can cope with such hard minimum constraints and soft maximum constraints, and in the end produce more reliable dates. Mike and Phil present detailed evidence for fossil-based calibration dates. Read more...
		October 2006 - Dani Schmidt is awarded a Royal Society research fellowship Dr Dani Schmidt, currently in the Department as a NERC Research Fellow, has just been awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF). This highly prestigious post gives her at least five years of funded research on a wide range of themes. She works on the evolution of Foraminifera through the past 100 million years, and the evidence they offer about high-resolution aspects of climate change in deep time. Read more about Dani...
		October 2006 - Bristol palaeontologists discover more about earliest animal embryos A team from Bristol and other institutions has used x-ray imaging to reveal more detail of the internal structures of Doushantuo embryos (see story below): they are from dervied metazoans, not sponges. The Bristol team members are Phil Donoghue, Neil Gostling, and Maria Pawlowska, a third-year undergraduate studying the MSci Palaeontology and Evolution programme. Read more...
		August 2006 - Bristol palaeontologists reconstruct ancient embryos using microscopic imaging Detailed images of embryos more than 500 million years old have been revealed by an international team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol's Dr Phil Donoghue. This week the journal Nature published pictures revealing the developmental stages of fossilised embryos, using synchrotron-radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy. Read more...
		October 2005 - Dinosaur expert, Emily Rayfield, joins Bristol Palaeontology Research Group Dr. Rayfield's is interested in the biomechanics and evolution of dinosaur skulls. She researches the application of engineering analysis to questions of morphological function and evolution in living and extinct organisms. She has also virtually reconstructed skulls using laser and computed tomography (CT) scanning techniques. Read more...
		May 2005 - Report on Bristol end-Permian mass extinction project Leaden skies, darkness at noon, and suffocating air. A few rare survivors inhabit this desolate planet. This is not a nightmare scenario for a possible future, but a description of the Earth 251 million years ago, at the end of the Permian age. Read more...
		January 2005 - Mike Benton publishes third edition of Vertebrate Palaeontology Vertebrate Palaeontology is a complete, up-to-date history of the evolution of vertebrates. The third edition of this popular text has been extensively revised to incorporate the latest research, including new material from North and South America, Australia, Europe, China, Africa and Russia. Read more...
		May 2004 - Fossil trees help understand climate change A unique assemblage of giant fossil trees has been found in 300-million-year-old rocks by Bristol palaeontologist, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang. The 45m tall fossilised trees are the oldest upland forests ever found. The timing of upland 'greening' has major implications for understanding global temperatures in the past, and will help refine models of present-day climate change. Read more...
		January 2004 - 500-million-year old fossil embryos from China Evidence from fossilised embryos of worm-like creatures that lived 500 million years ago shows that embryos developed then in much the same way as their living relatives do today. The implications of this remarkable discovery, reported in this week's issue of Nature, are that embryological processes that occur today must have been established very early on in the evolution of animals. Read more...
		May 2003 - When Life Nearly Died: a new book by Mike Benton The topic of the book is the end-Permian extinction, an event less known to the average reader but of far greater impact than that of the KT boundary extinction of the dinosaurs. The Permian devastation left the planet with only 4-10% of its previous species. It was a bottleneck of major consequence for subsequent biodiversity. Read More...