Millions of years ago, crocodiles were far more diverse (and weird) than the ones we still have around today. They ranged from armoured, tank-like forms living on land and feeding on plants, to 9 metre long fully-fledged swimmers out in the open oceans. In the Jurassic period, most of the crocs we know of were of this second kind, the whole marine forms. These comprised a group known as thalattosu ...[Read More]
Recently, there was a pretty massive discussion about the practice of live-tweeting at conference talk hosted on this blog. While the discussion is by no means over, or particularly conclusive, one idea to emerge was having an icon of some sort on slides during talks to indicate whether or not they could be live-tweeted. Sarah Werning has been kind enough to create and share some logos following t ...[Read More]
Europe 150 million years ago must have been a brilliant place to go on holiday. Tropical islands, warm lagoons to bathe, a warm climate, and nine metre long crocodiles noshing on anything that couldn’t swim fast enough. Ok, so maybe not that great for humans, but if you were an ancient archosaur, living alongside dinosaurs and other now extinct animals, life must have been pretty sweet. Thes ...[Read More]
This was originally posted on James Lewis’ personal blog at: http://marsblogger.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/minerals-and-the-search-for-life-on-mars/ (Re-posted with permission) Understanding if life could ever have existed on Mars is one of the most challenging scientific questions facing us in the 21st Century. We know that the Martian surface at present is an arid environment bombarded with ...[Read More]
Macmillan have released an interesting press release, announcing that all research papers published in their 49 Nature Publishing Group (NPG) journals, including Nature, will be made free to read online, via one of Digital Science’s pet projects, ReadCube (note that Digital Science is also owned by Macmillan). These articles can be annotated in ReadCube, but not copied, printed, or downloaded. Thi ...[Read More]
One is rather inspired. OpenCon 2014 was a wonderful time bringing together the best minds in early career research and the ‘world of open’ to discuss how we make access to knowledge, data, and educational resources better for everyone. It wasn’t so much an event*, as a milestone. Here’s the story of its success. I don’t want to run through the basics of each aspect o ...[Read More]
Tl,dr version: I think we need more appropriate guidelines for live-tweeting conferences, specifically regarding the broadcasting of sensitive research. This should be at the discretion of the author, and ideally stated at the beginning of each talk. Suzie Maidment, a colleague and friend of mine, recently started a major discussion on and off the internet with the following tweet: “I do think we ...[Read More]
April Wright recently published a cool paper looking at how to bring morphological analyses of evolutionary relationships into the Bayesian realm. This is her take on it – enjoy! Author Bio: My name is April Wright, and I’m a graduate student in David Hillis’ lab at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m largely interested in the estimation and use of phylogenetic trees to ...[Read More]
This is a slightly delayed summary of the sauropod symposium on day 2 of IPC4, following sessions the previous day on vertebrate taphonomy and diversity and extinction in the fossil record. This is also the final of these little summaries, and for that I apologise – my laptop is a bit kaput atm, and needs power sockets to run and which were not available in some of the rooms. I might be a little c ...[Read More]
Following on from the previous post, the afternoon symposium was all about the applications and implications of vertebrate taphonomy. Matt Carrano kicked things off with a great talk on how microfossil bonebeds help to guide our understanding of terrestrial palaeoecosystems. Using sites from the well-known but poorly understood Cloverly Formation, he provided a key insight from abundances from ter ...[Read More]