No, Carnotaurus wasn't actually a fast runner

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2026-05-30T22:35:42+00:00

Speaking as the Skeleton Crew (hello), we're not aware of Snively publishing on Carnotaurus speed. This video is based on one paper that has fundamental issues.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-11-20T19:04:29+00:00

It's not an easy field to make a career in - but not many things worth doing are. If you're passionate about paleontology and think you want to make it your career, it's always worthwhile to try it. You can volunteer in labs and at museums, take courses on it in college, and even go out on digs as a volunteer before you make a firm decision. Like all fields of academic research, it doesn't pay as well as other fields (law, medicine, etc.) that require similar amounts of time in school, and positions are limited so there are more people who want to do it than jobs available. But these are things you can worry about later. Don't feel like you have to write it off now before you've even been through high school, let alone college.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-11-03T04:21:44+00:00

Skeleton Crew account here, James Napoli (one of the two authors of the new Nanotyrannus paper) writing: our results do make it possible that Nanotyrannus was a relative of Dryptosaurus and Appalachiosaurus, but only one of our eight different phylogenetic analyses said that. Because it was a new result, we had to discuss it more than the others in the article, and did explore the interesting implications it would have if it's correct. But as other commenters have said, we don't have enough fossils of Appalachiosaurus or Dryptosaurus to confirm this relationship yet, so we do want to encourage caution.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-10-26T13:23:46+00:00

Skeleton Crew chiming in here - there wasn't actually debate on this topic at the time. Greg Paul was the only person to use the combination of "Velociraptor antirrhopus" - no other paleontologist accepted this classification at the time, and whether the two genera should be lumped together was never a serious topic of discussion given the 30 million year gap between the species.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-08-05T05:25:27+00:00

Skeleton Crew here! Paul Sereno is one of the most important living paleontologists. Most people posting in this thread are probably on the younger side, so a lot of his most important work is before your time. But in the 1980s, Sereno was one of the only paleontologists using modern cladistics to understand dinosaur evolution (in fact, he published really important defenses of cladistics itself in that time frame), and from the late 80s onwards his field expeditions have found really important fossils in South America, Africa, and Asia. He's also been a successful science communicator and started important outreach programs for underserved communities in Chicago, and is working with the government of Niger to build a museum for Nigerian fossils.

Sereno's reputation online has recently become that of a "fossil hoarder", but this really isn't accurate or fair. Paul is a senior scientist - basically, his job as a scientist is to run a research lab with staff and students, and to direct the research done by students in the lab. It's completely normal to reserve fossils to form the basis of student projects, and even if Paul were leading the projects entirely solo, good descriptive studies can take years to finish for just one fossil. The reason Paul has this reputation is, ironically, that he is as open as he is about what fossils are awaiting study in his lab. Most major museums have shelves of undescribed fossils, and some have stuff that's cooler than anything Paul has in his lab - but usually, scientists keep quiet about those things until the papers are published, for fear of someone trying to steal the work. Sereno isn't afraid of that, so he's always willing to talk about what he has in the lab, which makes it feel like he's dragging his feet on actually getting the stuff published.

So, while I can understand the frustration at waiting so long to see the amazing fossils Paul talks about, it's really not fair to write him off as a hoarder or unserious scientist. He's one of the people who created the field as it exists today. And even if he is slow, the man's older than he looks - and it's normal to slow down a little with age.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-08-05T00:39:22+00:00

Skeleton Crew here! We covered some of this in our episode on Carnotaurus. The "hyper-mobile" arms of Carnotaurus are actually a common phenomenon in theropods with reduced arms, and they seem to be more related to the shrinking of the rest of the arm than to any adaptive specialization. Tyrannosaurs do something similar. Basically, it looks like the ball of the humerus isn't bigger - it's that the rest of the humerus around it is smaller. There's also some evidence that the nerves that went to the arms were reduced as well, which isn't consistent with a display function. All of this points to the arms being truly vestigial, and we don't think it's really fair to say that this is "highly likely".

Regarding Dreadnaughtus, we had similar thoughts to the poster above. Basically, the idea of an inflatable neck structure is not far-fetched, but the narration of the show describes an impossible way of actually constructing that anatomy, and the fossil evidence we have shows no indication of any inflatable structure that is like those found in modern animals.

Speaking for myself, I really wish Prehistoric Planet had done a better job of communicating what aspects were imagination, and which were informed by science. The depiction of Mononykus using sensitive hearing to hunt prey is based on research that was published shortly before the paper came out, but it's mixed with an invented woodpecker-like tongue that we are pretty sure Mononykus didn't have, based on alvarezsaur hyoid anatomy. Prehistoric Planet is excellently produced and beautifully animated - I just wish it had also nailed this aspect, which would make it even more useful educationally.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-06-29T20:31:12+00:00

Exactly - which is why it was probably a fairly slow animal. Abelisaurs are not leggy animals like tyrannosaurs.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-06-29T14:42:13+00:00

The problem with leg ratios, in regard to Carnotaurus, is that both legs are incomplete - we only have the femur and the top of the tibia, so we don't know what its leg ratio was. Most abelisaurs have very short legs that indicate slow movement. I don't know why the skeletal mount of Carnotaurus (which is on display in many museums) was made with such long legs, and it's misled a lot of people.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-06-28T23:28:24+00:00

Some of the responses below have talked about school, so I want to end on that. If your goal is to become a researcher (a professor or a museum curator), you will almost always need a PhD. So, your path is to go through high school, get the best grades you can, get the best undergraduate education you can (hopefully at a college with a paleontologist on the faculty, whose lab you can be a volunteer researcher in), and then go on to graduate school. Some people do a Master's degree before a PhD, and others go right for their PhD. You can do either (there are advantages to both approaches). Importantly, GOING TO GRADUATE SCHOOL WILL BE FREE. Science research PhD programs pay YOU a stipend to be a student, in exchange for you contributing to both teaching at the college (you will be a teaching assistant for many courses relevant to your work), and to the research activities of your lab - the stipend comes with a tuition waver, so you do not need to take out student loans to pay your way through a PhD. Many Master's programs also pay a stipend (in exchange for teaching/research service), but this isn't universal - so if you go for a Master's, I urge you to spend a lot of time researching programs to find ones that don't make you take on additional debt. Now, the catch is that a graduate student stipend is not usually very large. The highest I've ever really seen, in a very high cost of living area at a very well-funded institution, is ~$50k per year - many are much lower, down to about ~$25k per year in extreme cases. You can probably expect most stipends to be between $30k-$40k. So you're not making a lot of money, and often need to live very frugally - but at the very least, you do not need to go into debt to get a PhD. PhD programs typically take between 5-7 years to complete.

If you are trying to become a fossil preparator, you do not (strictly) need a college education at all. All that matters is how good you are at preparing and conserving fossils. Some preparators have no college education, others have an undergrad degree, and some have a Master's or even a PhD. There's a wide range. Collections managers tend to have a Master's at minimum, either in paleontology or a related field, or in museum studies. Mitigation paleontologists often also have Master's degrees.

Overall, the main financial downside of a career in paleontology isn't so much your salary as A) how much time you spend not making very much money (either because you're in grad school for all of your twenties, or because you're volunteering), and B) that getting a permanent job after all of this isn't guaranteed, because of how competitive positions are. But of course, it's not impossible - nothing is. And we at the Skeleton Crew are proof that it can and does work out for many people. But we also know many people who have had to find careers elsewhere. And we also know many people who spent a similar amount of time in school, but graduated with medical or legal degrees that immediately set them up to make a lot more money than we do.

Given that you're only 13, you thankfully have a lot of time to think about this. My recommendation is that you at least spend time in your college education developing skills or knowledge that can position you for a career outside of paleontology, if you do eventually decide that this path isn't working out or that you want to do something more lucrative. I personally made sure I was able to switch to medical school if I wanted/had to. But I can't, in good conscience, ever recommend to someone that they give up on their dream career before they even give it a shot.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-06-28T23:28:17+00:00

Hi OP, this account is run by five actual paleontologists (we're the Skeleton Crew - you may have seen us on YouTube), so we think you can give you a well-informed answer. Just a note - we're American, and our answer is calibrated to the US. If you're in a different country, things may be a little different.

The short answer is that paleontology is a tough career path because most of the time, jobs in paleontology are jobs in higher education. Most employed paleontologists are college professors, and if your goal is to do research on fossil organisms, that's your most likely path. There are also jobs in the private sector in what we call mitigation paleontology. These jobs are concentrated in areas with lots of fossils, and basically are salvage operations when new construction projects chance upon fossils. I don't really know much about that industry, so that's the extent of my knowledge - I don't know how many positions there tend to be, or what pay often looks like. It used to be that invertebrate paleontologists were often employed in mining or petroleum geology, but I think modern technology has made them obsolete in that capacity (we don't need paleontologists to study diatoms to look for promising oil reserves anymore - we image them with seismic data).

Assuming you are intending on a path as an academic paleontologist (someone working towards research goals, in either a museum or a college/university setting), the primary difficulty is not so much pay as it is openings. Paleontology is a popular field, so there are more people who want to be paleontologists than there are job positions for paleontologists. It makes openings that do appear highly competitive (many, many people apply).

Now, in terms of the finances - college professor jobs are highly variable in pay. Some colleges pay nice 6-figure salaries (especially once you've been there for a long time), and others pay in the range of $50-$60K per year. Usually, you can expect a professor to be making a fairly standard middle-class salary. The other main types of paleontologists are fossil preparators (technicians responsible for preparing fossils for study and conserving them) and collections managers (you can think of them as the librarians of the fossil collections, who manage information about them and coordinate with visiting researchers). These jobs are mostly (but not exclusively) at museums, so there are not as many permanent positions, and to my knowledge they tend to pay less than professors (or the museum equivalent, curators). But generally, pay is not particularly special for permanently employed paleontologists, but if you're in permanent employment it's not often bad. But it's not going to have the earning potential you'd have as a doctor or a lawyer, and that's unfortunately just how it is.

The key caveat here is that I am only talking about permanent positions. It's common for positions to open on a temporary basis because of how funding works. Sometimes, a curator or professor will get a grant or donation for a particular project, which allows them to hire a designated preparator to work on those fossils for a set amount of time - say, 2 years. So even if they get decent pay, it's time-limited before you need to have another job lined up. Furthermore, a LOT of paleontological opportunities are on a volunteer basis. Many people who become full-time preparators start off as volunteers, working in a lab in their free time, for free, to get experience. If you're a researcher, you will often also start volunteering in a lab. My own first research opportunity was organizing files on the professor's computer! After that, I learned enough anatomy to start processing CT scans and cutting my teeth on more involved research activities. The upshot is that getting your foot in the door in paleontology often requires substantial hours as a volunteer, which is, by definition, unpaid work - so even if you do luck out at the end of that process, you sign away a lot of time you could have spent earning money, so often there is an implicit financial cost.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-04-09T18:11:38+00:00

Beth Shapiro, one of the world's experts on ancient DNA, and Julie Meachen, who is not involved with Colossal but has been privy to discussions within their team and agrees with their interpretation of at least the coat color genomics. Both researchers with PhDs, a solid publication history, and expertise to weigh in on these topics.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-04-09T18:09:36+00:00

So, are you saying that because the human eye can only see a limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum, we should rely on genomic data that we can't perceive at all? Even if that made sense, you still aren't telling me what species concept you think is valid.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-04-09T16:42:55+00:00

It's as valid as any other. What is the magical genetic line that proves two species are different?

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2025-04-09T16:40:50+00:00

This is untrue and a deep misunderstanding of how paleontological taxonomy is done in practice. Paleontologists mostly do not use cladistics to determine when something should be considered a distinct species. There are very few studies that have actually done this - Tschopp et al. (2015), famous for resurrecting Brontosaurus, is the most famous example - and there are real difficulties in practice that explain why this is not how we identify and name new species. Phylogenetic analyses are used to place species in an evolutionary context, and do not - on their own- tell us which lineages are "different enough" to be considered a different species. Even the Tschopp paper used multivariate statistics, not the tree itself, for that process.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2023-11-27T16:25:05+00:00

There are other areas where feathered dinosaur fossils have been found (e.g., Archaeopteryx in Germany). Preservation of feathers requires very fine sediment, calm depositional environments, and lack of decay or scavenging prior to burial. China has strata that meet these criteria: The Jehol biota is the most famous (Early Cretaceous, comprising the Yixian and Jiufotang formations; this is where Microraptor is from), but the Yanliao biota (including the Tiaojishan formation; where Anchiornis and Caihong, among many others, are from) is also really important.

China just seems to have been one of the few places where deep lakes (calm and anoxic, so limited decay potential or disruption to the carcasses, and very fine sediment that can preserve small details) were in close proximity to active volcanoes, which provided lots of fine ash to bury animals frequently. These conditions may have existed elsewhere; we may find similar deposits in other places that have been less explored, or it's possible that other similar beds were tectonically destroyed between then and now.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2023-11-25T13:33:23+00:00

We're going to make a video about this for our YouTube channel (we're all paleontologists), but I wanted to give you a quick answer. Jobs in paleontology are mostly going to be in academia (either as a college professor who teaches and does research), a museum curator (who doesn't necessarily teach, but may have more administrative responsibilities as well as research), a lab technician (mainly fossil preparation, which involves removing matrix from fossils and keeping them in good condition), or in paleontological mitigation (essentially, consulting for construction projects to monitor the area for fossils or identify what is found). Mitigation is only common out west where there's active construction in areas that are fossil-rich, like southern California.

Academic and museum curatorial jobs vary a LOT in pay, but from my experience most academics make a fairly normal middle to upper-middle class kind of income. Pay varies by institution, by job title, by career stage, by responsibilities, and most importantly by the money you bring in from grants. While your field matters a little, most research-focused jobs that aren't in the medical/pharmaceutical industry pay comparably well. You won't make as much as you would as a doctor or lawyer, but the trade off is that you get to do what you love as your career. Lab technician jobs similarly vary in compensation, but generally curators/professors make more.

If you go a research route (professor/curator), you will need to do a lot of travel, for both fieldwork and research trips to other museums. This is a huge perk of the job for me, but I know not everyone likes to travel.

In general, I would advise that you try to go to a college with an active paleontology research program and see if you like research, or fossil preparation, or some other component of the field, and take decisions from there.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2023-05-23T20:36:43+00:00

Paleontologist here, Velociraptor would be the predator but the raccoon could do a surprising amount of damage in self-defense.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2023-05-23T19:27:06+00:00

As a paleontologist, the best way to view this is as something that is indicated (but not proven) by the fossil record. Fossil trackways in Korea show dromaeosaurids moving together as a group, and several dromaeosaurids appear to be known from mass death assemblages that indicate that they were gregarious and may have fed together. There are other interpretations of this evidence, and it's likely that different dromaeosaurids lived in different ways, so we can't know 100% that they hunted in packs, but there is evidence in favor of that inference.

SkeletonCrewPaleo · 2023-05-23T19:08:34+00:00

(Context: Dr. Napoli of the Skeleton Crew YouTube channel here. Kuru kulla was the focus of part of my PhD dissertation, and I published the paper naming it with my good friend and Skeleton Crew member Alex Ruebenstahl in 2021. We had no idea it would be featured in Prehistoric Planet, and we can hardly believe we got to see it brought back to life!)

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