EGU Blogs

trees

Are the days of parsimony numbered? Probably.

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 answer questions about evolution. Particularly, I’m investigating how we can make the best possible use of our fossils in an era increasingly dominated by genome-scale data. You might say I’m a little bit of a ‘small data’ scientist, though my questions often involve a multitude of small data sets.

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about a recent paper I published as part of my PhD thesis work.

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New Palaeontology podcast series

Palaeocast is a little side project I co-run with Dave Marshall and Joe Keating. It’s a new podcast series focusing on Palaeontology (shocking), and about getting the science directly from the scientists. We recognise that science is a process, not a series of facts, and wish to convey this process; the methods, the ups and downs, the snake bites, the everything, and really open up the world of Palaeontology.

Our logo – cool eh!

We’ve got 4 episodes currently up, and more on the way!

Episode 1: The earliest fossils and the hunt for extra-terrestrial life, with Dr. Leila Battison (NASA)

Episode 2: The giant trilobite, Isotelus rex, with Dave Rudkin (ROM, Canada)

Episode 3: Amber, and parasitism in the fossil record, with Dr George Poinar (OSU, USA)

Episode 4:The fossil forests of ancient gilboa, with William Stein (NYSM, USA)

Please do check them out, and give feedback! If you have any suggestions for future episodes, drop a comment here, and we’ll see what we can do.