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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 here.
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You've read the blog, now buy the books....
herpetology:
The scales of typhlopids at least are thick and strongly overlapping, and in some species the scales glow under UV light (I don't think anyone knows why); furthermore, the scales are so thick that shed skins are said to be rubbery in texture. A pair of cloacal sacs - the retrocloacal sacs - are also present in these snakes, the function of which remains unknown (they were suggested to function in sperm storage but Shea (2001) showed that this was not the case).
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Posted on May 16, 2008 5:44 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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',...
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Posted on May 12, 2008 3:41 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on May 10, 2008 8:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on May 4, 2008 6:27 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on May 2, 2008 1:19 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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..
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Posted on May 1, 2008 5:35 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on April 30, 2008 5:14 AM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on April 29, 2008 4:57 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
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Posted on April 28, 2008 7:01 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The unusual fossil mammal skull posted here yesterday was, of course, that of the astrapotheriid astrapothere Astrapotherium magnum, as many as you said. But I'm a bit surprised that more people didn't get it straight away, given that astrapotheres...
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Posted on April 25, 2008 5:17 AM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
