Everyone is excited by discoveries of new dinosaurs – or indeed any new fossil species. But a key question for palaeontologists is ‘just how good is the fossil record?’ Do we know fifty per cent of the species of dinosaurs that ever existed, or ninety per cent or even less than one per cent? And […]

Methods have been developed to try to identify and correct for bias in the fossil record but new research from the Universities of Bristol and Bath, suggests many of these correction methods may actually be misleading. The study, led by Dr Alex Dunhill, formerly at the Universities of Bristol and Bath and now at the […]

What happens when the modern evolutionary theory of punctuated equilibrium collides with the older theory of mosaic evolution? Part of the answer comes from a new, wide-ranging study by paleobiologists Melanie J Hopkins at the Museum fuer Naturkunde Berlin and Scott Lidgard at the Field Museum in Chicago. Their results are published this week in […]