Nic Rawlence • Jul 10, 2018 •
I’m lying on a beautiful golden sand beach. The bright sun is beating down upon me. I could be on an isolated, tropical island, if not for the lone giant moa sculpture looming above my head. This sentinel to a lost world stands at the aptly named Old Bones Backpackers at Awamoa, (originally named Te Awa Kōkōmuka), south of Oamaru. Read More
Guest Author • May 14, 2018 •
Felix Georg Marx, Monash University and Robert Ewan Fordyce The largest living whales – including the gigantic 30-metre blue whale – are fast predatory hunters that support their massive bodies by filtering large volumes of tiny prey from cool near-polar waters. They do this using baleen: plates of a tough substance hanging from their upper jaw. Evidence … Read More
Nic Rawlence • Apr 18, 2018 •
Ground control to Major Tom: The otherworldly Herangi Hill at Motu i Pao/Cape Maria van Dieman where Fred found the ancient Moho skull. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Carol. In the pouring rain, surrounded by flowing sand lava and cascading lahars, Fred Brook gingerly walks towards Matt Rayner and me. He’s sliding across a steep sand dune, his hands carefully … Read More
Jean Balchin • Apr 11, 2018 •
There are a number of things about my physical appearance I’m not 100% happy with. I’m pale, covered in freckles and I burn like a crisp on the odd sunny day. But perhaps worst of all is the fact that my eyebrows are virtually non-existent. Unless I carefully pencil them in each morning, my friends and coworkers struggle to ascertain … Read More
Nic Rawlence • Mar 19, 2018 •
It’s the height of the Central Otago summer – barren, dry and dusty. Driving down the gravel road to St Bathans, we’re travelling back in time, down the rabbit hole to a world long gone. Only ghosts remain of this lost world and that’s what we’ve come here to find. The fossilised bones of a myriad of animals dating back … Read More
Nic Rawlence • Mar 05, 2018 •
New Zealand has long been considered the cradle of penguin evolution. But two new fossil discoveries, affectionately known as Bice’s, (pronounced Bee-chee’s), and Rosie’s Penguins, are rewriting early penguin evolution and have taken the world by storm. Move aside Penguins of Madagascar; there are some new and cool kids on the block! But how did we get to this … Read More
Guest Author • Jun 09, 2016 •
By Gerrit (Gert) van den Bergh, University of Wollongong and Adam Brumm, Griffith University It was back in October 2004 when archaeologists first unveiled the partial skeleton of a tiny, small-brained hominin previously unknown to science, now known as Homo floresiensis. These “Hobbit”-like creatures first appeared at Liang Bua cave, on the Indonesian island … Read More
Guest Author • Apr 20, 2016 •
By John Long, Flinders University Palaeontologists and the famous Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz were once in search of the same thing: a heart. But in our case, it was the search for a fossilised heart. And now we’ve found one. A new discovery, announced today in the journal eLife, shows the perfectly preserved 3D … Read More
David Winter • Jun 19, 2011 •
I see that Prime is playing a documentary by David Attenborough on the origin of the animals. One of my favourite people talking about one of my favourite topics is motivation enough to dust off one of the many posts in The Atavisms massive "drafts" fo... Read More
Brendan Moyle • Nov 15, 2010 •
Trilobites first appeared in the geological column in the Cambrian era (543 to 490 mya). They were an enormously successful group of animals, with some 5000 genera and over 30,000 described species. Many of the trilobites became extinct during the great late Devonian extinction (c 360 mya) . The last of the trilobites became extinct in the even greater Permian-Triassic … Read More