This is the version of an interview posted on Discover Magazine, prior to editing. I like this version a bit more due to the personal touch. Besides beloved childhood pets, once an animal is dead we usually prefer it to stay that way. However, there is a nostalgic beauty in being able to see what […]
“This shouldn’t take too long..” said this idiot last week. As part of the development of PaleorXiv, I’ve now built a comprehensive database of self-archiving policies for journals that publish Palaeontological research. The different columns represent different ‘stages’ of manuscript publication at which you can self-archive for free: Preprint: Version of a research paper prior to […]
The Paleobiology Database (PBDB) is a public, digital archive of the fossil record. Based on countless hours of work from more than 400 scientists around the world, it now contains more than 1.3 million individual fossil occurrences from around the world in a single database that is accessible by everyone. That’s pretty awesome. What’s even more […]
tl,dr: We’re launching a preprint server for Paleontology, paleorXiv. Email me for submissions. Open Access is the future of publishing, one way or another. One way that different research communities are doing this is through preprints. These are research articles that are published online prior to the peer review process. The main rationale behind them […]
One month ago, I defended my PhD thesis and passed my viva exam, proving that basically anyone can become a Doctor these days. I got ‘minor revisions’ as a result, which was just to shorten the abstract to institutional format requirements, and cut the waffle from the Introduction. I kinda liked the waffle though, as […]
If I ask you to think of a large, extinct carnivorous reptile, what do you think of? I’m gonna guess that pretty much all of you went straight for a T. rex, or if you’re a bit weird (or vegetarian), maybe a Stegosaurus. But if you think back in time of when the dinosaurs were […]
One of the great questions in life. Clearly, this had been plaguing Alana Sharp, a postdoctoral researcher from Australia, so much that she had to go out and research it for herself! In part of a memoir series published by the Victoria Museum, Alana carefully analysed the skulls of fossil and living wombats to see […]
Chaaaaange places! Sometimes, when extinction hits it’s not quite the dramatic ‘great dying’ we might think of where animals choke their final breaths out in the desolate, lifeless wastelands. Sometimes, it’s more like the Mad Hatter’s tea party from Alice in Wonderland: chaotic, messy, no major character dies, but you can be sure that something […]
Mass extinctions are insanely catastrophic, but important, events that punctuate the history of life on Earth. The Jurassic/Cretaceous boundary, around 145 million years ago, was originally thought of to represent a mass extinction, but has subsequently been ‘down-graded’ to a minor extinction event based on new discoveries. However, compared to other important stratigraphic boundaries, like […]
Spinosaurus is without a doubt one of the most iconic and badass dinosaurs that ever roamed the planet. It’s research history, however, has been complicated to see the least. Some of the original material of this species was lost or destroyed during World War II, and newer specimens discovered since come from questionable sources without […]