It isn't often that palaeopathology enters popular culture but then mammoths have long fascinated humanity. Perhaps it is because our ancestors actually lived alongside them, or maybe it is the existence of such beautifully preserved examples, often with intact hair and skin, that has given us such an intimate glimpse of these prehistoric mammals. A... Continue Reading →
It’s easy to imagine how hard it must be to diagnose an ancient disease from bones alone. Many illness leave no trace on the skeleton, and soft tissues are rarely preserved, so in most cases it is impossible to even say that an animal or prehistoric human was sick at the time of their death,... Continue Reading →
When you think of ‘air pollution’ you are probably imagining traffic fumes, or the thick photochemical smogs that shroud many modern megacities, or perhaps you even think of the ‘pea soupers’ in London that led to the first Clean Air Act in 1952. Now we know that air pollution is actually almost as old as... Continue Reading →
There are few dinosaurs quite as iconic as Tyrannosaurus Rex. At 12 metres long and up to 6 metres tall it was a ferocious apex predator, using its estimated 57,000N bite force to easily kill and eat the large herbivores of the day. Now you might expect that such a feared predator is going to... Continue Reading →
Around 300 million years ago the very first vertebrates made their way from the seas onto the land. They weren’t the first animals to make the transition, insects had beaten them to it several million years before, but they were the first animals with a backbone to make the evolutionary leap and at least one... Continue Reading →
