Georges Cuvier, the 19th-century French anatomist who first recognised pterodactyls as flying reptiles, wrote that “of all the beings whose ancient existence has been revealed to us, [they are] the most extraordinary”.

Now known as pterosaurs, this extraordinarily diverse, highly successful group lived alongside dinosaurs for more than 150 million years, occupying habitats around rivers, lakes, coasts and even the open ocean. While some species were quite small (no bigger than a pigeon), a few evolved into flying giants with wingspans exceeding ten metres.

Pterosaurs are unlike any other animal, living or extinct. Despite this, a surprisingly long list of fossils have been misidentified as pterosaurs – including a specimen of the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, and an extinct aquatic reptile, Tanystropheus, which had extraordinarily long neck vertebrae like some pterosaurs.

One of the most renowned misidentifications occurred in 1939 when Ferdinand Broili, a Munich-based palaeontologist, described a new pterosaur, Belonochasma, based on what appeared to be the remains of jaws bearing hundreds of long, fine teeth.

Several decades later, Franz Mayr, founder of the Jura Museum in Eichstätt, Germany, recognised the true nature of these remains. The “teeth” were actually gill filaments. More complete fossils, including remains of the body, showed unequivocally that Belonochasma was actually a fish.

Back in the 1930s, it could be years before publications became widely known and decades before errors were corrected. The gentle pace of research meant misidentifications usually had little impact.

Contrast that with today’s digiverse. Now, most palaeontologists are aware of newly published research within days or even hours of publication – and can immediately start downloading datasets that include it.

This rapid dissemination and repurposing of data – in the case of palaeontology, relating to age, geographic location and bodily structure – mean that errors can also spread very quickly.

A highly unusual fossil

In November 2025, a team of Brazilian palaeontologists led by Rodrigo Pêgas, based in the Museum of Zoology at the University of São Paulo, described what they took to be a new pterosaur. Bakiribu waridza had been found in 110 million-year-old Early Cretaceous rock of Araripe in northeast Brazil.

This highly unusual fossil apparently comprised several small fish plus the remains of not one but two pterosaurs – each represented by what were claimed to be fragmentary remains of jaws, plus hundreds of fine teeth.

Pêgas and colleagues speculated that these specimens were contained in dinosaur vomit (known as regurgitalite) so large that it could only have been produced by a huge predator – perhaps a Spinosaurus-like theropod dinosaur. Enthusiastically promoted, the newly announced Bakiribu drew much attention, including numerous palaeoartists’ impressions and its own Wikipedia page.

However, a group of us who study pterosaurs – including David Martill and Roy Smith from the University of Portsmouth, and Sam Cooper from the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History – soon spotted some problems.

Comparing our extensive collection of high-resolution digital photographs of pterosaur fossils with published images of Bakiribu, it appeared that its “teeth” did not extend along both sides of the jaw in symmetric fashion, as with all toothed pterosaurs. They also lacked a root, which is omnipresent in pterosaur teeth. Moreover, features such as dentine and dentine tubules, typical of pterosaur teeth, appeared to be absent.

We also noticed that bone fragments associated with the supposed jaws did not match any cranial element of pterosaurs, and their coarse external texture was unlike the smooth finish typical of pterosaur bone.

So, what was Bakiribu? Martill recalled the 1939 Belonochasma episode, which prompted me to examine the original fossil during a visit to Munich earlier this year. It was immediately clear that Belonochasma and Bakiribu were remarkably similar.

Comparing Bakiribu with the fossil remains of ancient bowfins discovered in the same rocks, and taking advantage of Cooper’s expertise in fossilised fish, we were able to identify the supposed teeth of Bakiribu as gill filaments, and the associated bony elements as branchials (structures that support the gills). Like Belonochasma, the Bakiribu fossil was in fact a collapsed gill arch of a large fish, preserved alongside two smaller fish.

A paper detailing our findings has just appeared in the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. Pegas and colleagues, who disagree with our conclusions, were offered an opportunity to publish a response in the same issue of the journal, but did not take up this invitation.

Misidentifications matter more now

All palaeontologists – myself included – have misidentified at least one fossil during their careers. The fragmentary, incomplete nature of many fossil remains means erroneous identifications are as inevitable as death and taxes.

But in today’s world of rapid international communication, it is all the more important that they are highlighted as quickly as possible. Fortunately, the digiverse can also help do this.

Within five weeks of the first appearance of Bakiribu, our team flagged the possibility of a misidentification by posting a reinterpretation as a non-peer reviewed “preprint” article. And only five months later, our fully peer-reviewed account was published.

The speed of the digiverse means this alleged regurgitalite has rapidly been regurgitated. But doubtless many other misidentified fossils remain unsuspected, and more mistakes will be made in the future.

Once spotted, however, at least we have the tools to quickly verify such errors, in order to restrict their impact on the body palaeontologic.

David Unwin, Reader in Palaeobiology, School of Heritage and Culture, University of Leicester

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This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

Why are people ticklish and why are different people ticklish in different places? – Magali, 10, Townsville.

Hi Magali. Thanks for your great question.

People have asked this question for years. Lots of scientists have thought they knew the answer but then other scientists have found they were wrong. The real answer is that scientists still don’t really know why we are ticklish.

There are different kinds of tickles

Our skin is able to detect different feelings. The skin uses different cells inside of it to tell us feelings such as touch, vibration and pain. Scientists think perhaps the feeling of being tickled comes when the skin cells are telling us we are feeling pain and touch together.

There are two types of feeling that are described as a “tickle”. Their scientific names are “knismesis” and “gargalesis”.

1) Knismesis occurs from a light touch, like a feather touching you and can happen on the skin anywhere on the body. This type is also seen in cats, dogs and lots of other mammals.

2) Gargalesis occurs from a heavier touch to “ticklish” parts of the body (like the tummy, underarms and the soles of the feet). This can make us laugh even if we don’t want to. This response also happens in apes.

What scientists used to think

About 150 years ago, a famous scientist named Charles Darwin thought tickling was linked to our sense of humour. He thought this because we laugh when tickled, just as we laugh when we find something funny.

Scientists found this was wrong because when we find something funny we laugh as a sign of enjoyment. But lots of people don’t enjoy being tickled and when they laugh and smile they can’t help it. Some scientists think that it could be like when we cry from cutting onions. That type of crying does not show you are sad.

Other people have thought tickling was a way to build a relationship between other people, such as brothers and sisters, or a parent with their child. Scientists have found that this isn’t right either as we can be tickled by robots.

What we think could be the cause

We can’t tickle ourselves. This is because your brain takes your movement and intention into account when responding to the sensation, and this reduces the ticklish nature of the touch. This could mean we use tickling to help us know what our own touch is.

Your brain has to deal with a lot of information coming in all the time. When that touch is from another person or thing, this is important to know - it could be a spider crawling on you! The knismesis feather-touch type of tickle might be part of our system for determining when something is touching us.

Some researchers think gargalesis, the heavy tickle, might help us learn to fight. The laughing from tickling encourages the tickler to keep going while the person being tickled tries to protect the ticklish parts of the body. It could be something like a reflex - just like when there’s a loud unexpected noise like a balloon popping in your face you can’t help being startled.

Why some people are ticklish and others are not, and why people have different ticklish spots is still a mystery!

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

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Anina Rich, Associate Professor Anina Rich, Macquarie University and Mark Williams, Professor, Macquarie University

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Why do people get the hiccups and how do they get them? And how do you get rid of them too? – Noah, aged 10, Brunswick East.

Hi Noah! Those are really great questions. We all get hiccups, but most of us don’t think much about them.

Let’s start with what happens when you hiccup.

There is a sheet of muscle under your lungs called the diaphragm. It’s very important, even though you don’t normally know you are using it. When you breathe in, this muscle pulls your lungs so they can fill up with air.

When you get hiccups, you are getting involuntary spasms in this muscle. This makes you take in air really fast, like a super quick breath. The air rushing in shuts your vocal folds, causing the “hiccup” sound. Sometimes you hiccup once, other times for a few minutes. In very rare cases, they can last a very long time. The world record is more than 60 years!

Hiccups are usually started by eating or drinking too much and too quickly – particularly with fizzy drinks. This can stretch and upset your stomach, causing hiccups as the diaphragm contracts. Sudden changes in temperature or getting too excited might trigger this too. These hiccups are normally over quickly. However, if someone has an illness in their brain, nerves or tummy, they might get hiccups often or for a long time.

So how do you make them go away? Do you hold your breath? Drink water upside down? There are lots of stories about what fixes hiccups. Most hiccups go away on their own so it’s hard to say if these tricks work. They could just be a distraction, but they also might help reset the nerves causing the hiccups. A big study comparing all the different treatments found that none of them actually work.

Why we hiccup is a very good question, and the answer is we don’t really know.

Hiccups serve no obvious purpose. It is possible they did something in our distant evolutionary relatives and never left us. Tadpoles have a hiccup reflex which helps keep their lungs safe while they transition from breathing underwater. So our hiccup reflex might be from our amphibian ancestors.

We all start our lives inside the liquid of our mum’s womb. So another theory is that hiccups stop us from breathing in the womb, or might be a way to train breathing muscles after birth.

The short answer is we know what hiccups are, but we don’t really know why they happen. The good news is that mostly you don’t need to worry about how to make them go away!

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

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Emma Beckett, Postdoctoral Fellow (Human Molecular Nutrition), School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

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Dear Conversation people, why do Aussies have a different accent to Canadians, Americans, the British, New Zealanders, etc? Thank you in advance – Kiana, 11, Switzerland.

This is a great question, Kiana. The short answer is that the accent you have depends on the people you grew up with and the history of the place that you live in. If you grew up in Australia, your accent is shaped by the history of Australia’s European settlement; if you grew up in New Zealand, your accent is shaped by a different history, so it sounds different.

It’s automatic for us to talk in a similar way to the people around us and this feature is really strong in kids. Friends have the biggest influence on accent. Sharing an accent helps to show that you are connected to your friends – that you belong to the group. This is also how new accents begin. Kids are very important in creating new accents.

The Aussie accent started with kids

It’s important to remember that the Aboriginal people had been using their own languages for thousands of years before the Europeans came to Australia so English was a foreign language to them.

The Aussie accent, as we know it today, started more than 200 years ago with the children of the convicts, soldiers and other European arrivals. The parents spoke with all different kinds of English accents because they came from many places in England.

But their children born in Australia formed friendship groups and started to talk in ways that were more like each other and less like their parents.

Over the years the children’s accent was carried on by each generation and became the main accent of English across Australia.

There are lots of different kinds of Aussie accents

In 1965, two linguists named A.G. Mitchell and Arthur Delbridge wrote that there were three distinct accent types in Australia: broad (think Steve Irwin), general (think the hosts of an Australian morning TV show like Sunrise, for example) and cultivated (a bit more British-sounding, like Cate Blanchett).

But it’s actually a lot more complex than that.

The Aussie accent has been changing gradually for over 200 years as the Australian society and people have changed, and now there are lots of different types of Aussie accents.

There are Aussie accents from the city, from the country, from older and younger people, from different places in Australia, from Indigenous Australians, from people whose families came from Lebanon, Greece, Italy, Vietnam, China, India and lots more too.

These different Aussie accents are all Australian.

But the Australian accents are different from the accents of America, or Canada, or New Zealand because those accents were created from kids growing up in those places with different communities and histories.

Accents are all about the people we spend time with when we are young. People who grow up in Australia usually spend lots of time with other Australians and that’s why they speak with Aussie accents and not American, Canadian or New Zealand accents.

The different kinds of Aussie accents also help Australians to feel connected to Australia. Accents help to give people a sense of belonging and a feeling of home.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Felicity Cox, Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics Centre for Language Sciences (CLaS) ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University

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This is an article from Curious Kids, a series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

How does glow in the dark paint work? – Roman, age 5, Katoomba.

To answer your question, we need to talk about light. This is not an easy thing to do. About 100 years ago, the world’s smartest scientists even argued about what light really is. And they argued for many years.

Light is actually a bunch of tiny things that scientists call “photons”. These little things can travel unbelievably quickly.

How quickly? Well, imagine this: photons can go around the entire world more than seven times in just one second.

When these photons reach our eyes, we see them as light. The more photons there are, the brighter the light.

Photons can come in all the colours of the rainbow. They also hold energy which can turn into heat. This is why it feels warm when the sun shines.

But, not all light is the same. Blue and violet photons both have more energy than red ones, for example.

Invisible light

Now here is a weird thing: there are some types of light that are invisible!

For example, ultraviolet (UV) light, which has even more energy than blue and violet light, is invisible.

Sunlight contains some of this powerful UV light. Because it has so much energy, it can cause a lot of damage, like sunburn, if you get too much of it on your skin.

Another invisible type of light is infrared light. Infrared means “less than red”, so this light has even less energy than red light.

Making paint glow

Many light sources, like the Sun or an old light bulb in your bathroom, glow because they are really hot. Normal glowing, like that of the Sun and a light bulb, requires objects to be really hot for us to see it.

As you already know, you can see glow-in-the-dark paint, but if you touch it, it is just as cold as the bedroom wall. So, the glowing of the paint must be different to the glowing of a light bulb.

The paint has a special kind of glowing called “luminescence” and it can only be created from a few types of material. One such material is what scientists call “luminescent phosphors”, and this is what makes your paint glow. Scientists make luminescent phosphors in the lab by mixing special chemicals together, and then add them to the paint. The paint is then sold to factories and manufacturers who put it on toys, stickers, and even inside colouring pens.

While some things glow all the time, like the sun, glow-in-the-dark paint must be “told to glow”. Just like your parents need to charge their phones every night to make them work, these materials need to be “charged” before they start glowing.

In fact, the charging of your glow-in-the-dark paint is done by other types of light. The invisible UV light with lots of energy can charge the special phosphors in your paint and make it glow in your bedroom at night.

There are different types of glow-in-the-dark paint. One type can be charged during the day and can glow for hours in the dark at night. The charging that happens during the day, for example by sunlight, is stored in the paint for some time, just like in the battery of a phone.

This type of paint is called phosphorescent. The other type, called fluorescent paint, only glows while an invisible UV light is turned on to charge it.

You might have heard that some animals can glow. Here’s a video all about that:

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

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Thorsten Trupke, Professor of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering, UNSW Sydney

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Why aren’t birds pulled down by the force of gravity while they’re flying? – Claudia, age 7, Canberra.

This is a great question, and funnily enough there is a recent news story out which helps answer it.

In the United States, a dead goose weighing over 5kg fell from the sky. This poor goose shows us that flying birds can fall from the sky under the force of gravity, just like everything with mass.

The larger the mass (or how much something weighs), the larger the force of gravity. This goose fell from the sky because it was killed while flying. The other geese flying with it did not fall because they were doing a few important things to fight the effects of gravity.

To stay up, the bird must overcome gravity with a force called “lift”. Lift is a very active force, made by moving the wing at speed through air. It causes the bird to rise upwards, as shown in the picture below.

To create lift, the bird holds the front part of its wing slightly higher than the back part. As the air passes over the wing, (from front to back), the air underneath is pushed downwards. This pushes the wing (and bird) upwards. A bird’s wings are just the right shape to build this upward force.

Birds of different shapes and sizes have wings that provide the perfect amount of lift for their needs. The Australian pelican is one of the largest flying birds, weighing almost 7kg - that’s about as much as two bricks! A pelican’s wings need to be very big to create enough lift to overcome gravity. They also need to move very fast for take off. That’s why large birds like pelicans typically have to run a long way before flying.

Large flying birds can also create lift using patches of warm air that form, for example, over hot rocky ground. Hot air rises and that means birds can spread their wings over these patches and get a free lift.

Smaller birds also need to create enough lift to be able to fly. That’s why so many birds are light compared to animals of similar sizes. For example, a fully grown zebra finch bird is about the same size as a house mouse but weighs just 12g, while the mouse weighs around 19g.

Birds also have hollow bones with lots of air spaces inside them. If you break open a chicken bone the next time you have chicken for dinner, you will see this for yourself.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

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Simon Griffith, Professor of Avian Behavioural Ecology, Macquarie University

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