John Pickrell's Blog

Exciting news for fans of Flying Dinosaurs, my new book – Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange New Fossils Challenging Everything We Thought We Knew – is coming very soon. Advance copies  are hot off the press and have just arrived from my publisher NewSouth. It goes on sale in Australia on 1 November. The US/UK version ... [Read more...]

  Yi qi – China, Late Jurassic (160 million years ago), described 2015 This astonishing, 60-cm long dinosaur left experts gobsmacked when it was announced in April. A single fossil reveals that its very long fingers had a membrane of skin stretched between them, and attached to its body. This gave it wings akin to ... [Read more...]

“I’ve never before assembled a formal end-of-year-list of what I consider to be the best bird books published but, inspired by Ian ‘Birdbooker’ Paulsen’s recent blog piece, “The Best Bird Books of 2014”, I decided to share my bird books choices for this year, too,” says Guardian blogger GrrlScientist. “Ian’s choices are aimed at ornithologists, ... [Read more...]

“I’ve never before assembled a formal end-of-year-list of what I consider to be the best bird books published but, inspired by Ian ‘Birdbooker’ Paulsen’s recent blog piece, “The Best Bird Books of 2014”, I decided to share my bird books choices for this year, too,” says Guardian blogger GrrlScientist. “Ian’s choices are aimed at ornithologists, ... [Read more...]

“A marvelous book. The moment life took to the air—caught in stone!” — Tim Flannery, environmentalist and palaeontologist. Flying Dinosaurs has launched in the the US this week!  To celebrate, my US publisher Columbia University Press is running a giveaway. Find more details and enter here on their blog. Similarly, for Australian readers,  Australian Geographic ... [Read more...]

  Juvenile birds often act as carers in the nest, helping their parents to bring up younger siblings. These kind of babysitters are seen in as many as 300 species – about three per cent of all birds – and the behaviour is much more common than in any other group. Many Australian and African ... [Read more...]

The word ‘dinosaur’ conjures images of a massive T. rex or a stoic Stegosaurus, both members of a group that died out around 66 million years ago. But what if that wasn’t the case? The new book Flying Dinosaurs: How fearsome reptiles became birds challenges the widely held belief that there are no more dinosaurs ... [Read more...]

Come along to one of these events to hear Australian Geographic editor John Pickrell talking about all the latest dinosaur science: BENDIGO Spotlight on Flying Dinosaurs 9 August, 12pm, The Hub (next to the Capital). Free entry. Part of the Bendigo Writers Festival. More information. The Truth About Dinosaurs 9 August, 2pm, Discovery Science and ... [Read more...]

Last week a new teaser poster for 2015′s Jurassic World (Jurassic Park IV) was released at the Comic-Con event in San Diego, California. It’s a moody looking image featuring a lone and disappointingly featherless Velociraptor (to see what a Velociraptor would really have looked like, click here) It’s caused some ripples of excitement across the ... [Read more...]

Do you have backyard chooks? Have you ever looked at them and wondered if they were dinosaurs? New discoveries has found the humble chook, and it’s bird brothers, are closely related to dinosaurs. John Pickrell is the author of Flying Dinosaurs and ABC Central West Presenter Kia Handley spoke with him about this incredible connection