A year goes far too quickly. But a lot has happened. Rena is now Dr Rena after successfully completing her PhD. Ross has finished his book (The Missing Lynx) which is coming out in Summer 2019 (very exciting!). And Jan is beavering away at his museum. We also have some Twilight Beasts T-shirts, cups and other bits that you can buy!

With the end of a year comes the time when people pull together their ‘top ten’ greatest moments. We like to pull out the top 5 blog posts of the year. But we also like to highlight the bottom 5. In our eyes all of the posts are amazing, and why not share 10 great ones again? Browse through these 10 posts and immerse yourself in these incredible creatures of the recent past!

 Least read blog posts of 2018:

1. How do you weigh a Dodo? This is a question I have always pondered. Now you can find out! Plus it has lots of lovely dodo pictures.

A fierce, slim looking dodo by Carolius Clusius. (Image Public Domain)

2. Baby’s got quack: We like the witty titles. This one is about an enormous Japanese duck.

3. The ancients of the forests: Some trees in New Zealand are a geed few thousand years old. They are incredibly important to the ecosystems.

4. Getting inside the bones: Take a look at what scientists re doing to help identify bones in museums.

5. Side by side with Homo: Discover one of our weirdest relatives. The chunky, robust Paranthropus.

The robust skull of Paranthropus boisei (Image Bjørn Christian Tørrissen, Public Domain)

The most read blog posts of 2018:

1. A striped wonder: One of the saddest tales of extinction. The beautiful Thylacine. Gone forever.

A male and female Thylacine in Washington D.C. National Zoo. (Image E.J. Keller. Public Domain)

2. Under the boot of man: Another horrific extinction. This time, the Great Auk. The last egg of a great auk was crushed by a hunters boot.

3. Going underground: There were once giant ground sloths on Earth. And they dug ENORMOUS tunnels!

4. From Russia with love: Not only does this blog post have an exceedingly clever title, it is all about the most beautiful woolly mammoth so far discovered.

5. The End of the Ice Age: This is the first time a book review has made it into the top 5. And it’s a fantastic book, so well deserved!

From the three of us at Twilight Beasts, we wish you a very healthy, happy, and fun 2019! We look forward to sharing lots more beasts with you!

Rena (@JustRena), Ross (@DeepFriedDNA) and Jan (@JanFreedman).

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