Category: News

New research by a Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology student shows that sauropod dinosaurs had colour-bearing melanosomes in their skin. Tess Gallagher and colleagues studied fossilised sauropod skin remains, approximately 145 million years old, collected in 2019 and 2022 at the “Mother’s Day” quarry in Montana.

Although the fossil remains cannot be definitively identified, they might have belonged to a Diplodocus. Tess took tiny samples from four scales using a scalpel and then examined them with a scanning electron microscope, which allowed her to see details at the cellular level. The skin was preserved in three dimensions, not just as an imprint, says Gallagher.

It also showed the presence of various melanosomes — structures within cells that store melanin and form the color of skin, hair, eyes, and feathers. “I expected to find at least traces of melanin,” she says. “But we found evidence that sauropods could have different forms of melanosomes, which ultimately means the potential for diverse colours.”

Melanosomes were present in every sample studied, and they belonged to two main types: elongated and disc-shaped. However, it is currently impossible to say exactly what colours the skin of these sauropods might have been — only that the variety of structures indicates several possible shades.

The closest analogy to disc-shaped structures are the platelet melanosomes found in the feathers of modern birds. Gallagher says they may indicate Diplodocus‘ ability to create a variety of colors using its melanosomes. “These animals could have had much more distinct color patterns, rather than being gray, as they were often depicted in old palaeoart.”

Read the paper here.

Two recent papers by Palaeobiology MSc students examine the biomechanics of different vertebrate fossils from Brazil.

The first study is by CJ Saclido along with an international team of co-authors and was published in the journal Palaeontology. CJ’s work investigates the feeding biomechanics of Brasilodon, a cynodont that is thought to be a close relative of the earliest mammaliaforms. The work, which came out of CJ’s Palaeobiology MSc project, shows that as Brasilodon grew its jaw became stronger and more resistant, suggesting that its diet may have changed as it became older. The research also shows that the jaw muscles of Brasilodon worked in a way that was more similar to other non-mammaliaform cynodonts than to early mammaliaforms.

The second study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B by Ananth Srinivas and colleagues from Bristol, Hull and Brazil, addresses a long-standing hypothesis about the trade-offs between bite strength and aquatic adaptations in crocodiles and other aquatic predators that evolve from land-dwelling ancestors. The study was based on an examination of fossils taken from the Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of the Bauru Basin in Brazil, which preserves one of the most diverse and informative records of the evolutionary history of ‘crocodyliforms’ – the wider group that includes modern crocodilians and their extinct relatives. Three of the extinct species from the Bauru Basin were found to have dome-shaped (‘oreinirostral’) skulls. These were compared with three living species of modern crocodilians, which have broad, flattened (‘platyrostral’) skulls adapted for life in water. The findings show that the dome-shaped skulls of terrestrial ancestral crocodile relatives were much stronger and more efficient during feeding, when compared to the flatter skulls of modern semi-aquatic species. This suggests that modern crocodyliforms have traded strength for streamlining as they adapted to life in water.

Here are the details of the papers:

Salcido, C.J., Gill, P.G., Martinelli, A.G., Rawson, J.R.G., Corfe, I.J., Soares, M.B., Francischini, H., Schultz, C.L. and Rayfield, E.J. (2025), Functional morphology and biomechanics of an ontogenetic series of the Triassic cynodont Brasilodon quadrangliaris and bite performance in the sister taxon of Mammaliformes. Palaeontology 68, e70026. https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.70026.

Srinivas, A., Bright, J. A., Cunningham, J. A., Tavares, S. A. S., Ricardi-Branco, F., de Souza Carvalho, I., Iori, F. V., & Rayfield, E. J. (2025). Constraints and adaptations in crocodyliform skull evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 292, 20251773. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.1773.

MSc students Dan Marke and Perth Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul have described a new Middle Triassic fossil from Devon  that represents the oldest member of the lepidosaurs: the group that includes lizards, snakes and the tuatara. The work was published in Nature by Dan and Perth, along with supervisors Mike Benton and David Whiteside, and co-authors Rob Coram, Vincent Fernandez, Alexander Liptak and Elis Newham.

Perth had studied the fossil using conventional CT scanning as part of his MSc project and found fantastic detail. However, as the skull is so tiny – only 1.5 cm long – some of the key features were hard to see. So Dan and his supervisors used synchrotron CT scans to get even finer resolution, using two powerful beamlines at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (France) and the Diamond Light Source (UK).

As well as revealing the oldest lepidosaur, the scans provided new information about feeding in early lepidosaurs and threw light on the initial diversification of the group. You can find out more in the press release or the paper:

Marke, D., Whiteside, D.I., Sethapanichsakul, T. et al. The oldest known lepidosaur and origins of lepidosaur feeding adaptations. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09496-9

The MSc in Palaeobiology began in 1996, and over the years, hundreds of students have completed the programme. In 2024, MSc students published 15 papers, bringing the total since 1996 to 200 publications.

This is a great achievement through the hard work of so many students; for most, this is their first publication and to avhieve it, they not only had to complete an excellent research project,  but also go through the rigours of turning it into something publishable, and working through the sometimes thorny to-and-fro with reviewers.

As an example of one of the 15 papers published by MSc students in 2025, Rachel Kruft Welton showed how bivalves respond to increased water temperature, acidity, deoxygenation, and changes in salinity as examples of past and current climate change stressors (figure below).

Bristol MSc student Thitiwoot Sethapanichsakul published the second paper from his MSc thesis, about the internal structure of tooth replacement in rhynchosaurs, a group of reptiles that walked the earth between 250-225 million years ago, in the Middle and early Late Triassic, before being replaced by the dinosaurs.

Congratulations to Sarah Jamison-Todd for publishing her MSc research, on jaw mechanics of ichthyosaurs, in the Journal of Anatomy and having the work featured on the front cover of the December 2022 issue. You can read Sarah’s paper here (open access).

 

Since he graduated in 2021, Will Richardson writes that he has been working as a lava cave tour guide in Iceland, inside Víðgelmir lava cave. Here he is (left) in a spectacular view.

 

Tom Halliday, who completed the MSc in 2011, has just published his first book, ‘Otherlands’ to high critical acclaim. The publisher, Allen Lane-Penguin, provide this blurb, “Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerizing up close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.

“Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air – is grounded in the fossil record.”

Tom Holland, author of Dominion, says ‘The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read’. That’s pretty unequivocal praise. Otherlands is in the Sunday Times bestseller list for February and March 2022, and is already recommended as one of the best books of 2022.

In his MSc, Tom worked on fossil crocodilians from Central Asia, including a visit to see the specimens in Moscow. Since then, he has completed his PhD on the evolution of early fossil mammals, and is Honorary Researcher at the University of Birmingham.

Tom comments: “I loved my year as part of the Palaeobiology MSc cohort in Bristol, and it reaffirmed my desire to continue to study the history of life in all its aspects. From biomechanics to palaeoecology, from a day in the prep lab to a foreign museum visit, I was introduced to the diverse world of palaeontological research beyond taxonomy. In a sense, Otherlands is continuing that more complete vision of Earth history that I first encountered in Bristol more than a decade ago.

 

Jane’s MSc project on ‘Evolution of ecospace occupancy by Mesozoic marine tetrapods’ has just been published in Palaeontology, and you can read it here. In her study, Jane reviewed all the ichthyosaur, plesiosaurs and other toothy monsters of the Mesozoic seas, and determined their body sizes, diets (fishes, molluscs, each other), swimming styles, as well as their stratigraphic ranges. In previous studies, researchers had determined guilds (= ecological groupings that share modes of life) either on diet or locomotion, but here she combined all aspects of ecology that could be determined reasonably reliably. She coded 35 ecological traits for 371 species (work out how many cells in the data table!).

The multivariate numerical analysis showed that all these marine reptiles could be divided into just six ecological categories linking how they moved, where they lived, and how they fed: pursuit predators that chased their prey, ambush predators that lurked and waited for the prey to swim past (two groups, one in deep water, one in shallow), a fourth group of reptiles that could still walk on land, shallow-water shell-crushers and foragers, and marine turtles with a variety of life modes.

Jane then looked at how the different guilds responded to mass extinctions, such as that at the end of the Triassic, and confirmed the huge extinction and replacement by new clades. However, the surviving ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs showed considerable conservatism. They didn’t expand their ecological roles at all, and many niches were left empty until new groups of crocodiles and turtles emerged later in the Jurassic to take over these roles.

Jane Reeves added: “It was a great experience being able to study a large variety of creatures, and to then reconstruct the ecological lifestyles of extinct animals from just their fossils”. She is now doing a NERC-funded PhD on ‘The soft tissue fossil record to elucidate the origin and diversification of vertebrates’ at the University of Manchester.

You can read the University of Bristol press release here.

Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology student Jack Cooper has just published his thesis work, and to great acclaim. He studied the legendary giant shark Megalodon (Otodus megalodon) and his detailed morphometric study has revealed the size of the rest of its body, including fins that are as large as an adult human.

Matthew Skinner, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology at Bristol in 2019, has just published his research in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association. He studied a collection of fossils rom Ruthin Quarry in South Wales, which in the Late Triassic was a small island set in a tropical sea. Matthew discovered that most of the Ruthin beasts showed greatest similarity to relatives from North America.

He also found that many of the reptiles were more primitive than expected, a common feature of island species, and there was some evidence for the species-area effect (many animals on large islands; fewer on small islands). Matthew also named a new species, Smilodonterpeton ruthinensis (‘chisel-toothed reptile from Ruthin’), a procolophonid with strange, chisel-like teeth, and he used Ct scanning to determine the true nature of a mystery reptile that had been named from Ruthin in the 1950s, the plant-eating Tricuspisaurus thomasi (see scan and 3D digital model).

Read Matthew’s paper here.

Former Bristol MSc Palaeobiology student Emma Schachner, noted professor at LSU Health Sciences Center, Utah, has made the link from dinosaurs to the impact of the Sars-2 virus! She and collaborators modelled the impact of Sars-Cov-2 on the lungs of three patients from CT scans, and included a healthy person for comparison.  Emma’s journey is roughly this: Dinosaur-mad person -> experimental studies of respiration in modern crocodilians and dinosaurs (crocodilians, by the way, provide evidence for having a bird-like one-way respiratory system, evidence they were formerly endothermic, and reverted to ectothermy) -> human lungs and Sars damage to lungs. Excellent.

Read Emma’s paper here.

 

 

Congratulations to Sam Coatham who has published his MSc research on Titanichthys – a giant armoured fish that lived in the seas of the late Devonian. Sam’s work has shown that Titanichthys fed in a similar manner to modern day basking sharks. The research has attracted lots of media attention. You can read a summary here and the original paper here. Image by Mark Witton.

 

 

 

 

The Brothers McLeod, animated film-makers based in Stratford-upon Avon, have just had their short documentary animation ‘Marfa‘ nominated as one of three for this year’s Best British Animation Short at the BAFTA Film Awards. Miles McLeod, one of the ‘brothers’ completed the MSc in Palaeontology in 1999, and since then has worked with his brother Greg.

Myles is a BAFTA Award winning writer. He is an award-winning short filmmaker (two nominations for BAFTA Film Award) and has written dozens of scripts for TV. He has also created shows including co-creating DreamWorks’ Noddy Toyland Detective. In 2011 he won a BAFTA Children’s Award for his work on Quiff and Boot for the BBC.

Read more about the work of the Brothers McLeod, and about Myles’ writing career and ethos.

What possible connection could there be between palaeobiology and animated film?

 

 

Well done to all the MSc students who graduated this week! A special mention goes to Oliver Demuth, who won both the David Dineley Prize for the best MSc thesis in the class and also the Geologists Association Curry Prize for an outstanding MSc thesis in an Earth Science subject.  Oliver is pictured here receiving the David  Dineley Prize from Head of School Rich Pancost.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to Sophie Kendall (left) and Chloe Todd (right) who have both published their MSc research.

Chloe’s project looked at the effect of the late Pliocene environment, when carbon dioxide levels were similar to today, on the size and weight of planktonic foraminifera. Her paper is published in Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology and you can read it here. Chloe is now doing a PhD in Southampton.

Sophie used CT data to study morphological plasticity during the development of the first planktonic foraminifera. Her study is published in the Journal of Micropalaeontology and is available here. Some of her reconstructions are below.

 

Simone Conti, who completed the MSc in 2018, has published his Masters thesis on ‘The oldest lambeosaurine dinosaur from Europe: Insights into the arrival of Tsintaosaurini’ in Cretaceous Research for April 2020. He had the chance to work on some beautiful specimens from Spain, and it turns out the new specimens prove the existence of an unusual group of hadrosaurs, the Tsintaosaurini, in Europe, a group otherwise known from eastern Asia. Members of the tsintaosaurine tribe would have dispersed into the Ibero-Armorican Domain not later than the early Maastrichtian, coexisting with endemic dinosaurian groups for some time. Simone is now beginning his PhD in Portugal on the biomechanics of diplodocid sauropods, using engineering techniques, such as Finite Element Analyses and Multi-Body Simulation Systems. It is a joint PhD between the Aerospace Department of Politecnico of Milan (Italy) and the Geology Department of Universidade Nova of Lisbon (Portugal). You can read Simone’s paper here. The image shows the femur of Simone’s Spanish dinosaur.

Emma Schachner, who completed the Bristol MSc a while ago and is now a Professor at Louisiana State University, gave a TED talk at her University last year about her work on respiration in vertebrates and what this tells us about the origin and success of dinosaurs. The talk has now been selected to go live on the international TED talks site, and you can watch it here. The photo shows Emma and one of her greatest fans.

Bristol City Museum has shrouded some of its exhibits to highlight the impending risk of their extinction. This striking exhibit has been featured in an article in The Guardian, and is attracting widespread attention. Isla graduated from the Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology some years ago, and has since worked in a number of museum jobs. She is currently Curator of Natural History at the Museum.

Isla said, “The extinction crisis is causing a lot of anxiety among people. We have a unique role to play with our animal stories and histories, and in creating a space for conversation and doing something positive to raise awareness. We want to help people imagine a world without these incredible creatures.”

She is shown with a stuffed Bengal tiger, once represented by 100,000 individuals, now only 4000. “Some animals on the list are surprising, like the giraffe and chimp,” she says. “Familiarity is part of the problem. Extinctions can be silent, especially as many iconic animals seem a common part of our everyday culture.”

Emma Bernard, Curator of Fossil Fish at the Natural History Museum, has just taken part in the ‘Mission Jurassic’ excavations in Wyoming. These are a partnership between The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis (project lead), with the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Naturalis (Leiden).

A key part of the programme was to document the geology and all fossils, not just the dinosaurs, and Emma was there to keep an eye on this wider range of finds. Emma completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in Bristol in 2007, and did a variety of jobs before getting the Curator position.

As she reports on her NHM web page, “I participate and lead in a number of outreach events every year, such as the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. I regularly take part in collection enhancing fieldwork all around the world; America, Morocco, France and have lead field teams to various localities within the UK.” Here she is leaving the BBC (yet again) after a live interview on Radio 5 about the recent dig.

Congratulations to MSc graduate Amy Ball, who has just published her first book, The Rocking Book of Rocks. The book written with Florence Bullough and illustrated by Anna Alanka is published by Wide-Eyed Editions and is aimed at children aged 8-11. You can find out more about the book here. Amy currently works as the Education Officer for the Geological Society of London.

Congratulations to former MSc student Albert Chen whose MSc research on pancrustacean phylogenomics was published in Genome Biology and Evolution. You can read the full paper here.