Articles for category: Fossils & Fieldwork

A BLM volunteer uses a compressed air tool called an air scribe, which operates like a miniature jackhammer, to chip through the hard rock matrix that covers the fossil.

When Paleontologists Argued Over the Shape of a Single Bone

Picture this: the world’s most brilliant scientists locked in heated debates, their reputations on the line, all because of one mysterious bone fragment. What sounds like a scene from an academic thriller actually happened multiple times throughout paleontology’s colorful history. These weren’t just polite disagreements over coffee – these were full-blown scientific wars that sometimes ...

The Problem with Naming Dinosaurs from a Single Tooth

The Problem with Naming Dinosaurs from a Single Tooth

Picture this: you’re holding a single tooth, no bigger than your thumb, and from this lone fossil fragment, you’re expected to reconstruct an entire species that lived 100 million years ago. This isn’t science fiction—it’s the reality that paleontologists have faced for over a century. The practice of naming dinosaurs from isolated teeth has created ...

Fossil of a small dinosaur with delicate bones and extended limbs embedded in a light stone matrix. It's intricate and well-preserved, showcasing detailed structure.

From Flesh to Stone: What It Takes to Make a Fossil

Death is only the beginning. When a dinosaur breathed its last breath 100 million years ago, it had no idea it would become the star of a museum display in 2025. The transformation from living, breathing creature to stone-hard fossil is one of nature’s most incredible magic tricks—a process so rare and unlikely that most ...

an iguana in the grass near some rocks

What The Dinosaur Project Got Right About Field Paleontology

Picture this: a team of scientists crashes into a remote African plateau where time seems frozen, and massive creatures roam freely like something from 65 million years ago. While “The Dinosaur Project” might have been pure Hollywood fantasy, buried beneath its adventure-movie exterior lies a surprising amount of scientific accuracy about how real paleontologists work ...