Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Palaeontology stuff Knapp et al: Patterns of divergence in the morphology of ceratopsian dinosaurs: sympatry is not a driver of ornament evolution. Cleary et al: Lepidosaurian diversity in the Mesozoic–Palaeogene: the […]
Welcome to your usual weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Palaeontology stuff Smiley (2018): Detecting diversification rates in relation to preservation and tectonic history from simulated fossil records. “Results from these simulations indicate that elevated diversification rates in relation to […]
Welcome to the first weekly roundup of vaguely interesting stuff that happened in the last week! Enjoy, and let me know if I’ve missed anything out. Palaeontology stuff Knoll et al. (2018): A fossil of a juvenile enantiornithine tells us about the skeletal development in early birds during the Cretaceous period. LeBlanc et al. (2018): […]
Naming a new species is a wonderful thing to do. It’s a statement that you’ve discovered an entirely new organism to science, and naming it is a personal touch about how you perceive the importance of it. Last year, researchers named a 34 million year old canine-like fossil from Egypt, with an exquisitely preserved skull. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
This was originally posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1204 In palaeontology, there are so many things more important than dinosaurs. For example, the study of large-scale patterns in the history of life on Earth, commonly known as macroevolution, is all about uncovering patterns of speciation and extinction. We are currently about to enter the sixth mass extinction within the […]
This originally appeared at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=1152 Last night, I was honoured to have spoken at the final evening lecture at the Cambridge Science Festival, along with Nick Crumpton, Anjali Goswami, Rob Asher, and Stephanie Pierce, about why palaeontology is important. Below is a rough transcript of some of what my talk was about. Unlike the others, I […]