May 13, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs
I have a lot on at the moment, so getting this finished wasn't easy - but I managed it. Here we are with the rest of my recollections from 'Dinosaurs (and other extinct saurians) - A Historical Perspective', held at Burlington House (home of the Geological Society of London) on May 6th and 7th (part I here). This time round we look at the second day of talks, as well as the posters and whatever else I can think to write about...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 8:52 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 12, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs • herpetology • pterosaurs
So, was it really 'the best conference of all time'? Hmm, maybe, but it was excellent and all went well (more or less). On May 6th and 7th I attended 'Dinosaurs (and other extinct saurians) - A Historical Perspective', a meeting featuring a packed schedule of talks and posters devoted to Mesozoic fossil reptiles and how they've been discovered and interpreted. Ably abetted by John Conway yet again, I made it to London on time for the field trip on the 5th to the Crystal Palace animals, and on the 8th and 9th went on a trip to the Isle of Wight (going both into the field and to Dinosaur Isle museum). There were also trips to the Dorset coast, but I couldn't go on those. A nicely illustrated book of extended abstracts was produced (Moody et al. 2008: cover shown below) and anyone seriously interested in this meeting should make efforts to obtain one (a technical volume, published by the Geological Society of London and including multiple contributions from the meeting, is in preparation). Anyway, what happened? Well...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 3:41 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 10, 2008
Category: conservation • herpetology
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you'll know that 2008 is Year of the Frog (more here), and that several projects - including Amphibian Ark and EDGE - are working to try and save endangered frog and toad species before they become extinct. We need to do all we can to continue to drum up interest in the conservation effort that many of us are now involved in. Quest, a science show at KQED (the PBS station in San Francisco), has just produced a new video concentrating on the decline of Californian Yellow-legged frogs R. boylii (aka Foothill yellow-legged frog, and it's - apparently - not R. boylei as often stated) and Red-legged frogs R. aurora draytonii: you can watch it here (with extras), or right here, right now...
PS - remember to sign the online Amphibian Ark petition!
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Posted by Darren Naish at 8:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 4, 2008
Category: community • conservation • frivolous nonsense • herpetology • picture of the day
Ok, signing off for a while now. Among other things, the above will get discussed when I get back: the image on the right (from here) might look somewhat, err, 'inspired' if you're familiar with the original produced by Mark Witton (see here and here). So long for now. Oh, actually, one last thing...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 6:27 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 2, 2008
Category: herpetology • ornithology
Yesterday, my colleague Anthony Butcher (who shares my office at UoP.. but, alas, works on Palaeozoic microfossils called chitinozoans) was driving out of our carpark when he realised that the grey object he had driven past on the pavement was a sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, plucking the pigeon it had just killed. He reversed, held his phone out of the window, and took several photos. The hawk - less than a metre away - couldn't care less and carried on. The photos aren't brilliant, but for me they bring home the point that we are surrounded by extraordinary animals doing extraordinary things, if only we care to look for it. Toni and I watched two male blackbirds battling over a territorial boundary last week, which had me thinking the same thing...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 1:19 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2008
Category: herpetology • picture of the day
This is not a world of reality TV, fashion, big-screen sport and daily newspapers, but one covered in seas, mountains, forests, ferns, beetles, frogs and birds - get out there and look at it. The good thing about living in a country with a depauperate herpetofauna is that you can go out on a day and see nearly everything. On Sunday I and other people from the Southampton Natural History Society went into the field with members of the Herpetological Conservation Trust to look at reptiles at Town Common, Christchurch (Hampshire)...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:35 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 30, 2008
Category: community • herpetology • mammalogy
Welcome to the third and final part of my write-up of the CEE functional anatomy meeting: for part I go here, and for part II here. Here's where we wrap things up, but let's get through the last of the talks: those on tuataras, and yet more on primates...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 5:14 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 29, 2008
Category: community • herpetology • mammalogy
More recollections from the CEE Functional Anatomy meeting: part I is here. We looked in the previous article at Robin Crompton's overview of primate locomotor ecology and evolution, Renate Weller's overview of new technologies, John Hutchinson's work on dinosaur biomechanics, and Jenny Clack's new look at Ichthyostega [adjacent image is Jaime Chirinos's Thylacoleo restoration]. Still loads more to get through...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 4:57 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2008
Category: Mesozoic dinosaurs • community • herpetology • mammalogy
At a vertebrate palaeontology workshop held in Maastricht in 1998, some colleagues and I sat in a bar, lamenting the fact that nobody cared about anatomy any more, and that funding bodies and academia in general were only interested in genetics. Given the poor to non-existent coverage that anatomy gets in many biology courses and textbooks, you might think that anatomy has had its day and that - as some molecular biologists told us in the 1980s and 90s - all the anatomical work worth doing had been published in the days of Owen and Huxley. Nothing could be further from the truth, and if you don't believe this you only have to consider the fact that a thousand basic questions of everyday anatomy have never really been studied, let alone answered. As demonstrated at the Centre for Ecology and Evolution workshop 'Modern Approaches to Functional Anatomy' (held at the Natural History Museum in London on April 23rd), we are in the midst of a new anatomical revolution, and these are very, very exciting times...
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Posted by Darren Naish at 7:01 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
With six years of tedious phd work on theropod dinosaurs behind him, Darren Naish stares longingly from his office window at the birds outside and wonders: why did I bother? He pursues exotic lizards and feral cats across the British countryside, occasionally prizes the skeletal jaws from hedgehog corpses, and aims to publish his technical work on obscure Cretaceous dinosaurs. He remains desperately in quest of an academic job that'll last more than a month, and - with a background in TV research, e-learning development, academic editing, popular writing, teaching, landscape gardening, parenting and the wonderful world of retail - he still holds out hope of becoming a dedicated academic. He can be contacted intermittently at eotyrannus (at) gmail dot com. For more biographical info go 
