Last October, the UN released a promo video, during which an animated dinosaur walks into the UN General Assembly and warns actors posing as delegates that humans will go extinct if we don’t address the climate crisis.

Shock-tactic publicity stunt, it may have been, but according to palaeontologist Phil Manning from Manchester University, real dinosaurs, through the fossils they’ve left behind, actually have something to tell us about how to live more sustainably – if we ask the right questions.

“We know that studying the fossil record can help quantify how living things interact with their environment,” he says. “But what if we could reverse-engineer enough information from these fossils to help us devise more sustainable solutions for current problems?”
Manning is known for using high-tech approaches to fossil analysis. He was part of a group of experts who used synchrotron X-ray analysis to investigate pigmentation in prehistoric birds and CT-scan technology...