Brains don’t normally fossilise. Soft body parts get decomposed by bacteria before the long process of turning flesh to stone can happen. It takes a rather unusual set of circumstances for a brain to fossilise.One day, a long time ago, a small plant eating dinosaur fell head first into a swamp from which it would sadly never escape. But the swamp in which it demised contained acid and salt. Acid and salt are what we use to pickle food. Our dino’s brain was pickled like an onion, decomposition was prevented and the brain fossilised. 133 million years later a fossil hunter found this fossil and scientists have been able to study it looking at its detailed structure and finding out that it is quite similar to the brains of modern birds and reptiles. We will never know if our dino friend dived into that swamp deliberately to preserve its brain for future scientists, but it probably didn’t.

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Almost every time we’ve compared men and women’s ability to recognise faces women have been better or there has been no gender difference. For the first time ever researchers have found a type of face that men are better at recognising: the faces of transformer toys. Women were better at recognising Barbie faces though. The research was conducted by psychologists interested in learning more about humans’ very powerful ability to recognise faces and their findings suggest that early childhood experiences play an important part.Read more here.