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An excellent four-page review of our recent title Dear Sir - Sixty-nine years of Alfred Russel Wallace Letters to the editor (edited by Charles H. Smith and Kelsey Patterson) has just been published in the latest volume of the Entomologist's Gazette (2015, vol. 66: 295-298). Following are some snippets taken from the review: "This fascinating book throws up many interesting, quirky, occasionally funny, insights into the life of a man who was the ‘Sir David Attenborough’ of his day.""This book, edited by Smith & Patterson, adds to the sum of knowledge and understanding of Wallace in a unique way …...

I could not resist posting this for Halloween! In paleontology, a zombie taxon (plural zombie taxa) or the zombie effect refers to a fossil, such as a dinosaur tooth, that was washed out of its original rock matrix and re-deposited in sediments millions of years younger, which then subsequently lithified to form rock. This could lead a casual observer to identify the fossil as being much younger than it actually is (given that the age of fossils is usually determined based on the age of the rocks from which they are extracted). This basic mistake in the interpretation of the...

Wing venation patterns in insects provide useful characters with which to classify living and fossil insects. Recently, quantification of its shape using landmarks (morphometric analysis) has increased the potential of wing venation to distinguish individual taxa such as species. However, the use of wing landmarks in elucidating how the species are related to one another (phylogenetic analyses) remains largely unexplored. In research just published in the journal Cladistics, Adrien Perrard and colleagues tested landmark analysis under parsimony (LAUP) to include wing shape data in a phylogenetic analysis of hornets and yellow jacket wasps. Using 68 morphological characters, nine genes and wing...

We are all familiar with CGI images of dinosaurs on our TV screens, but few may be aware that the same technology has been used to bring fossil insects 'back to life' as well! New research just published in the journal Arthropod Structure & Development (click here) revisits the fossilized larva of a green lacewing Hallucinochrysa diogenesi preserved in Cretaceous amber from Spain, originally described in 2012. The new article expands on the presumed behaviour of this species and includes a CGI video reconstruction of the larva in action. The video can be viewed by clicking here. This remarkable fossil...

OK folks, so the DINOSAUR BRITAIN weekend is finally here! Make sure you tune in to ITV on Bank Holiday Monday at 9pm for episode 1 and Tuesday at 8pm for episode 2. This will be a great documentary for the entire family and is co-presented by palaeontologist and author of our Dinosaurs of the British Isles book Dean Lomax. For a sneak preview of the content check out this link for a video clip. It looks AWESOME! ... and remember we have a limited time 10% discount on Dean's book using the code DINOBRITAIN at checkout. See the new...