Experiments carried out in fluidized beds of Geldart A and B powders revealed that in-bed pressure fluctuations typically have power-law statistics, which are well described by the Student's distribution. We show that the pressure statistics encode information about the bubble size distribution, and propose a novel method that allows an easy determination of the approximate shape of the bubble size distribution from the statistics of pressure fluctuations. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.