Episode 6: Tiny Horses, Galloping Crocs, and Fossilized Jungles!
The fossil record is pretty patchy. Most discoveries are tooth fragments, chunks of shell, or isolated slivers of bone and paleontologists are trained to eke out as much information from these precious...
View ArticleQuick Bite: New Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs!
Mammals were scrambling around during the Age of Dinosaurs and they're usually seen as small, shrew-like animals waiting for their chance to become diverse. But recent research, including three new...
View ArticleEpisode 7: Walking through Whale Evolution
Whales are spectacularly specialized mammals that seem perfectly adapted to their marine habitat. Plenty of other mammals have gone back to the water, but whales take it to a whole new level. No back...
View ArticleEpisode 8: Crocodiles are the Chomping Champions
Fossils are the raw materials of paleontology, but if we want to know how an animal moved or ate, paleontologists, like Dr. Paul Gignac, need to study living animals, too. Dr. Gignac studies...
View ArticleEpisode 9: New Relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex!
Tyrannosaurus rex is a dinosaur celebrity, a villain in most dinosaur movies and documentaries, but where did the massive beast come from? On November 6, 2013, a team of paleontologists including our...
View ArticleQuick Bite: The Giant Before the Tyrant!
Last episode we featured Lythronax, the oldest-known North American tyrannosaur and a close relative of Tyrannosaurus rex. But tyrannosaurs weren’t the only big carnivores to tromp through the Mesozoic...
View ArticleEpisode 10: The Hobbit – An Unexpected Discovery
Little people! Giant reptiles! Towering elephants! Huge birds! It sounds like the stuff of literary and box-office gold, but this Middle-Earth-like world actually existed 17,000 years ago on Flores, an...
View ArticleQuick Bite: The Alien Turtle and Ancient Color
Meet Alienochelys selloumi, a giant, snorkel-nosed turtle with powerful, shell-crushing plates in its massive beak! The distant relative of the largest turtle alive today, the leatherback sea turtle,...
View ArticleQuick Bite: From Terror Bird to Gentle Giant
50 million-years ago, the heir to Tyrannosaurus stalked the forests of ancient Europe and North America, snapping up the tiny ancestors of horses, cows, and wolves in its colossal meat-cleaving beak....
View ArticleEpisode 11: Trilobites and the Cincinnati Sea
Over 400 million years ago the oceans were teeming with life, but it didn’t look much like what you see at the aquarium or in Finding Nemo. Instead of colorful fish flitting through coral reefs, the...
View ArticleQuick Bite: Weird Whales and Swimming Sloths
Marine mammals are fascinating beasts. Whales, manatees, seals, otters...they've all gone back to the water and in the process evolved all kinds of spectacular adaptations to make a living in a soggy...
View ArticleEpisode 12: Growing up Dinosaur
When we think of iconic dinosaurs, like T. rex with its massive head full of teeth, and Parasaurolophus crowned with a gigantic, tube-like horn, we’re thinking of the features of adult dinosaurs. But...
View ArticleEpisode 13: Following in the Footsteps of Dinosaurs
When we think of paleontologists, we think of people hunkered down with bones, teeth, and shells studying the preserved body parts of dead organisms. But animals leave behind more than just their...
View ArticleEpisode 14: The Art of Dinosaurs
Conjuring up extinct environments, museums, books, and documentaries rely on art to show extinct animals revitalized in their ancient surroundings. This type of educational reconstruction is called...
View ArticleQuick Bite: Iguanodon, History of a Dinosaur!
Iguanodon was discovered before the word "dinosaur" was invented and the story of Iguanodon research is the story of dinosaur research as paleontologists use new fossils to test old ideas about what...
View ArticleNews Bite: Giant dinosaur brain from Uzbekistan!
Researchers lead by Hans-Dieter Sues from the Smithsonian Institution described a wealth of new giant, long-necked dinosaur material from Western Asia (Uzbekistan). They were able to reconstruct what...
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News Bite: Parental care in extinct reptiles
A new fossil shows an ancient reptile, Philydrosaurus, surrounded by young. Possible evidence that parental investment is a more ancient trait in land-based vertebrates than paleontologists thought!...
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Quick Bite: Clash of the Triassic Titans!
Under the canopy of an ancient fern forest near the border of Arizona and New Mexico a colossal crocodile-like reptile took a bite out of an even larger, toothy giant. The attack failed and the victim...
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News Bite: Crazy croc diversity in the ancient Amazon!
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi and other paleontontologists described the crocodiles from a gigantic wetland that predated the Amazon. Ten...
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News Bite: Brontosaurus revived!
Brontosaurus was an extinct name for an extinct animal, but a new study brings the “Thunder Lizard” title roaring back to life! But how does a name get dropped, and how does it get brought back again?...
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News Bite: Cosmic rays date ancient human ancestor
Dating fossils might sound like Saturday night for a paleontologist, but it’s serious science! In a new study, a group of physicists and paleontologists teamed up to re-date one of the most complete...
View ArticleNews Bite: Genes and Jurassic Park
Genes were the stars of Jurassic Park and the movie taught us what the near genetic future might be. (more…)
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News Bite: Basilisks in the Old(er) West!
The oldest basilisk lizard from North America, described by Jack Conrad from NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine, shows the 48 million year old animal was part of an ancient lush jungle ecosystem…in...
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News Bite: Salamanders of the Caribbean!
Arrr, ye mateys! Pour out some grog, and I’ll tell ye a tale of mines, beaches, and death in ancient jungles. I of course be talkin’…about salamanders! Okay, not going to do that voice the whole time...
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News Bite: Kerberos! Giant mammal carnivore from after the Age of Dinosaurs!
It weighed twice as much as a modern wolf. It had three pairs of meat-slicing teeth. It was the first carnivorous land animal to reach 200 pounds on the entire continent of Europe after the extinction...
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Episode 15: Degrees of Doctoral Dissertation Domination
It’s been a long time coming, but both Matt and I have completed our doctoral degrees at Stony Brook University. This is the end of a journey he and I began over six years ago, when we first moved to...
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News Bite: The evolution of ornithischian dinosaur jaws and bites!
With Past Time, Matt and I tend to focus on the new discoveries in paleontology: the new species that show up in the news, or the important specimens discovered in museum collections. These are the...
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News Bite: Dodos and the evolution of bird brains
If you wander into the basement of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, and wander into the fossil collections, you will find a vast array of different dinosaurs dating back over...
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Episode 16: Hunting Antarctic Dinosaurs
Antarctica is one of the great frontiers of paleontology. It’s been really far south for a long time, but it hasn’t always been frozen over. In February of 2016, a team of paleontologists and...
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A Tale of Two Crocs: Predators of Cretaceous Spain
I tried to google “crocodiles are living fossils,” to see just how commonly that expression was used in popular articles. There were indeed a few articles that referenced this idea, suggesting that...
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Grandma Sharkie: The Greenland Shark is the World’s Oldest Vertebrate Animal!
Growth is a universal facet of all organisms that have ever lived, but figuring out how old they grow isn’t always easy. A new study examined the growth in one of the biggest predatory fish in all the...
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A Food Chain in a Fossil: A snake skeleton with its prey still inside!
The relationship between predator and prey is a primal one, and one that fires the curiosity of many fossil fans. We love paintings of Tyrannosaurus battling Triceratops or saber-toothed cats leaping...
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Episode 15: Kingdom of the Monkey Lizard!
Past Time is BACK! Matt and Adam have been traveling the world independently for some time, delving deeply into the history of life on the planet, but now they’re back to tell you all about what...
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Episode 19: Masrasector—Egypt’s Ancient Slicer!
A few weeks ago Past Time co-host Matt Borths published a study that identified a new species of now-extinct carnivorous mammal from Egypt. The animal was near the top of the African food chain when...
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Episode 20: Digging the Dawn of Dinosaurs – Paleontology at Ghost Ranch
Hi all. Adam Pritchard here. I’ve been thinking about telling the story of my field experience in the Triassic-aged Chinle Formation of northern New Mexico for many years. The Hayden Quarry fossil site...
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Episode 21: New History of Ancient DNA
The quest to recover ancient genetic material from extinct animals had its blockbuster moment when Jurassic Park came out. But where did the idea come from and who is trying to figure out if the...
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Episode 22: Matheronodon, a new dinosaur with a different kind of bite!
Matheronodon is certainly a dinosaur worthy of a bigger bite. With proportionally giant teeth strikingly different from the standard-issue ornithopod dinosaur, it is certainly one of the most important...
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Episode 23: Meet the Echinoderms! Adventures with Ancient Sea Stars!
This episode was a blast to produce for a vertebrate scientist. I learned a ton about the echinoderms, the group of invertebrate animals to which sea stars, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, sea urchins,...
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Episode 24 – Dinosaurs and crocodiles in the Land Before Egypt!
Egyptian paleontology has a long and storied history, although much of it is focused on discoveries from the Cenozoic Era. Incredible fossils of early whales, primates, and other mammals have been...
View ArticleEpisode 25 – Ceratosaurs: Story of a Predatory Dinosaur Dynasty!
Masters of horns and teeth Throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, dinosaurs were top dogs on every continent and in every sort of environment. The ceratosaurs were some of the classic...
View ArticleEpisode 26 – Colobops: the tiny reptile with a big bite!
Big bites come in small skulls This episode tells a story of one of Adam Pritchard’s favorite projects from Yale University, describing the skull of a teeny reptile from the early days of the Age of...
View ArticleEpisode 27 – Machairoceratops: An Extinct Horned Dinosaur Under Threat!
Eighty million years ago, a wildly ornamented species of horned dinosaur roamed the southern half of North America’s western landmass, Laramidia. In 2016, paleontologist Eric Lund and his colleagues...
View ArticleEpisode 28 – PAST TIME reviews Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom!
First Iteration I (Adam) am both proud and nervous to say that this is an atypical Past Time episode, as we’re not talking about a new discovery nor a real scientific topic; it is a recap/review of...
View ArticleEpisode 29 – First of the Four-Footed Giant Dinosaurs!
Ledumahadi and the first dinosaur giants The sauropod dinosaurs—the classic long-necks—included the largest land animal species that have ever lived. Throughout the Jurassic and Cretaceous, multiple...
View ArticleEpisode 30 – SVP Recap, guest-starring I KNOW DINO
Meeting of the Minds There is no bigger paleontology conference for fans of dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, birds, fishes, and reptiles than the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting. The...
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Episode 31 – The First Frogs of the Age of Dinosaurs!
THE FIRST FROGS OF NORTH AMERICA Every discovery we make in natural history happens thanks to specimens. Fossil bones, shells, footprints, coprolites, tissue samples—even field notes and photograms—are...
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Episode 32 – The Changing Face of Crocodiles
Episode 32 – The Changing Face of Crocodiles INTRODUCTION TO GROWING UP – Every living thing grows up, and this episode of “Past Time” explores the evolution of the growing process. Specifically, we...
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Episode 33 – The Story of the Sloth
PAST TIME RETURNS! After three and a half months of discovering how insanely busy a museum curator can be, I (Adam) am back to past times with a brand new episode of Past Time! Join me on a journey...
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Episode 34 – March of the Trilobites
Of Collective Behavior and Trilobites Reading scientific papers can be a daunting prospect. Even the titles can contain layers of jargon. On Past Time, we work diligently to break down the barriers of...
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