Alan Charig News Today

On May 4 1939 a little girl in a black cloche hat arrived at Liverpool Street station, clutching a cuddly dog. Hannah Jacoby was four-years-old. She had travelled – alone, without her family – from Berlin, via Amsterdam, where her Dutch uncle had helped her onto the connecting train leaving for the port.

An examination of the fossil record by Birmingham researchers has uncovered a new species of giant Triassic crocodile named Mambawakale ruhuhu. Exc...

A set of Triassic archosaur fossils, excavated in the 1960s in Tanzania, have been formally recognised as a distinct species, representing one of the earliest-k

Recently described by palaeontologists led from the University of Birmingham, the beast - Mambawakale ruhuhu - would have reached more than 16 feet long.

A newly described archosaur that lived 240 million years ago in what is now Tanzania had "powerful jaws and large knife-like teeth."

Welcome to part II of my musings on the 2010 blogging year. You'll need to have read the first part to make sense of it. The article you're reading now is extraordinarily long and I'd normally break up a piece of this length into two, three or even more separate articles. This year I want to get the birthday stuff out of the way as quickly as possible, however, so bear with me. Hey, you don't HAVE to read any of it. And so, off we go...

The fossil is one of two newfound cousins of the bizarre dinosaur that together shed new light on how these predators spread across ancient Earth.