by Matthew Cobb

I spent Friday-Sunday last week at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition, helping out some colleagues from the Manchester University Geochemistry & Paleontology Research Group as they explained their research to the public. I had such fun, and the stuff we were talking about was so interesting. What follows is pretty much the pitch I gave to the public, as someone who wasn’t directly involved in the research. Two WEIT readers came up  who had recently graduated from Queen Mary, London – I didn’t catch their names, but hi!

The centre-piece of our display was a 120 MY old fossil of Confuciusornis sanctus, a basal bird from China – it is the earliest known bird with a beak. About the size of a pigeon, it had long twin tail-feathers strongly suggestive of sexual selection. This bird was one of a flock that was caught in a volcanic…