It’s conference season! Wooooo!! The annual meeting for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology is looming, and is taking place in Dallas this year. Damn I love Texas! This meeting represents the bringing together of the finest minds around the world in vertebrate palaeontology, and covers the whole spectrum of this vast field. The abstract book is now online and freely available in pdf form here.
There are a couple of things I want to draw attention to. The first is the social media policy, which has been updated since last year. There was a rather large debate about the use of social media and live-tweeting or blogging of conference presentations. I tried to summarise the major points of this here. The revised policy is as follows:
SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDELINES
Please Read Before You Tweet (Or Blog, Or Facebook, Or Instagram…)
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology encourages open discussion on social media and other outlets at our annual meeting. In order to find a balance between embracing social media and protecting authors’ work, we set forth the following guidelines:
- SVP has an embargo in place on discussing presentations until the beginning of the talk or poster session. Please do not discuss presentations until this time if you do not have the authors’ permission to do so.
- This embargo exists to protect the authors. As an author, you have permission to break your own embargo or permit someone else to do the same. This includes discussing your own presentation online, posting slides or posters, etc. However, to protect yourself, make sure you are aware of any potential future publisher’s policies about early dissemination of work.
- Do not photograph or video tape a talk or poster without the authors’ express permission. Never post any images or video without the authors’ permission.
- While the default assumption is to allow open discussion of SVP presentations on social media, please respect any request by an author to not disseminate the contents of their talk. The following icon may be downloaded from the SVP website for inclusion on slides or posters to clearly express when an author does not want their results posted.
This is great. In short, it says use of social media is allowed by default, but if an author asks you not to, respect their wishes. It’s the right balance between ‘openness’ and courtesy for colleagues. This might not be an appropriate policy for all conferences, but certainly shows that a good policy can be easy to derive, and is worth explicitly outlining in advance of the conference to avoid confusion.
Secondly, there’s now a code of conduct at the conference too. We probably all here horror stories from conferences, and it’s a shame that such a thing has to be explicitly stated. However, it’s there for the protection of attendees:
The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology expects meeting attendees to behave in a courteous, collegial, and respectful fashion to each other, student volunteers, SVP staff, and convention center staff. Attendees should respect common sense rules for professional and personal interactions, public behavior (including behavior in public electronic communications), common courtesy, respect for private property, and respect for intellectual property of presenters. Demeaning, abusive, harassing, or threatening behavior towards other attendees or towards volunteers, SVP staff, convention center staff, or security staff is not permitted, either in personal or electronic interactions.
Good. Now that’s settled. Perhaps not as strict as some would like, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
Finally, and of least importance, is my abstract! It’s on one of the projects from my PhD research (and one of the chapters soon..), on crocodile macroevolution:
ENVIRONMENTAL DRIVERS OF CROCODYLIFORM DIVERSITY AND EXTINCTION THROUGH THE JURASSIC/CRETACEOUS BOUNDARY TENNANT, Jonathan P., Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; MANNION, Philip D., Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; UPCHURCH, Paul, University College London, London, United Kingdom
Crocodyliforms are an extant group of highly successful pseudosuchian archosaurs. However, their macroevolutionary history remains poorly understood, partly as a result of heterogeneous sampling of their fossil record, which obscures genuine biological patterns. Here, we focus on their diversity dynamics through the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous, a relatively neglected period in crocodyliform history that witnessed the demise (e.g., the marine Thalattosuchia) and apparent radiation (e.g., the terrestrial Notosuchia) of major lineages. We take a combined approach to reconstructing their diversity via application of shareholder quorum subsampling (SQS) on a newly compiled and comprehensive fossil occurrence dataset (919 occurrences of 228 genera), as well as producing a phylogenetic diversity estimate (PDE) using a newly constructed and well-sampled (270 species) informal supertree. There is strong evidence for a substantial decline in total crocodyliform diversity through the Jurassic/Cretaceous (J/K) boundary, with terrestrial forms (including semi-aquatic taxa) suffering a more severe extinction than marine taxa. Marine genera show either a diversity decline through the J/K boundary (PDE), or a slight increase (SQS), although much of the Early Cretaceous is too poorly sampled for SQS to produce reliable diversity estimates. Extinction rates were highest in the latest Jurassic, and origination rates remained depressed through the Early Cretaceous. The responses of marine and terrestrial crocodyliforms to this extinction are decoupled; whereas marine taxa did not recover to pre-Cretaceous levels of diversity, terrestrial taxa rapidly recovered and exceeded pre-Cretaceous diversity. After accounting for serial autocorrelation in a range of environmental time series data, we fitted maximum-likelihood models to identify factors that might have driven our recovered diversity and extinction patterns. A combination of eustatic sea-level changes and perturbations to the marine sulphur cycle are primarily responsible for crocodyliform macroevolutionary dynamics through the Jurassic to Cretaceous interval. It is likely that these two factors are related, with a sea-level lowstand through the J/K boundary responsible for increasing sulphur toxicity, although we cannot rule out that climatic variability (e.g., a broad aridity belt covering the low latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere), or increasing volcanic activity (e.g., emplacement of the Paraná-Etendeka flood basalts), might also have played a role.
Grant Information NERC PhD studentship to JPT
The latest results are slightly different to this, and I’m hoping to submit them for publication shortly (once my supervisors have finished finding problems and improving it..). I hope you find it interesting though! I’m doing a similar set of analyses right now, but on all tetrapod groups, so that includes marine reptiles, mammals, lizards, snakes, pterosaurs, turtles, and of course, dinosaurs!
