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

A key focus is on the tree of life, establishing its shape and calibration against geological time scales. We also work on mass extinctions, diversifications, and the links between taxic and morphological change through time in a range of organisms, from foraminifera to fishes, pteridosperms to pterosaurs. Establishing links between the shape of the history of life and climatic and environmental change is another key field.

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 open-access educational initiative.

A further key focus is on the origin of major animal groups in the Precambrian and Cambrian - to determine the interaction of palaeontological with molecular and developmental data. Several students and staff work on trace fossils, ancient tracks and burrows, as evidence of ancient behaviour. Others work on the history of biodiversity, the tree of life, mass extinctions, and the relationship between evolution and animal development.

News from the Palaeontology Research Group
		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. 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. 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) show 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. 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 at the University of Bristol. 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 on Friday 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 project, 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 palaeotologists (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...