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tetrapodzoology | May 21, 2009Like most scientific communities, the world of academic tetrapod zoology is an incestuous place. Inspired by a comment made here at Tet Zoo by Matt Wedel - co-author, colleague and one of the three SV-POWsketeers - Cameron McCormick (who works on guppies but is collaborating with Michael Woodley and yours truly on sea monsters) has a new post up at Lord Geekington that I find pretty interesting. Employing the new term 'phylogenetic roulette', he laments the fact that people are inclined to latch on to highly specific identifications when mystery animals are reported, even though critical…
tetrapodzoology | May 18, 2009It might not be well known outside of palaeontology that the south-west of England is famous for its marine reptile fossils. But it is: some of the best, most historically significant, plesiosaur and ichthyosaur specimens have come from Street in Somerset and from Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorset.
These rocks - spanning the Triassic-Jurassic boundary and known collectively as the Lower Lias - yield the giant, robust-skulled ichthyosaur Temnodontosaurus, the swordfish-like Leptonectes and Eurhinosaurus, and the more familiar, dolphin-like Ichthyosaurus. The long-necked plesiosaurs…
tetrapodzoology | May 11, 2009It is with some sadness that I must pass on the news that Cyril Walker died last Wednesday (6th May 2009). Cyril worked at the Natural History Museum from 1958 until his retirement in 1999. He is best known for his many palaeornithological contributions: often working together with his colleague Colin Harrison (1926-2003), he produced numerous papers on fossil birds from all around the world. Among the more noteworthy of these are the pelagornithid review (Harrison & Walker 1976a) and the Prophaethon reappraisal (Harrison & Walker 1976b). Cyril also contributed to Charig et al. (1986…
tetrapodzoology | May 5, 2009Yesterday, Tet Zoo was the featured blog on the Nature Blog Network blog: if you haven't seen the interview please do check it out here.
NBN is well known to most bloggers who write about the natural world: it's a ranked network of blogs, all of which are united by the fact that they focus on animals, ecosystems, or outdoorsy stuff in general [the accompanying picture shows the Miocene phocid Acrophoca longirostris as featured in a mural at the SMNK in Karlsruhe. Image kindly provided by Markus Bühler. The image is irrelevant to the current article, but what the hey. Weird long-necked…
terrasig | May 5, 2009Bear with me this morning because I am growing very weary of my physician colleagues enduring all sorts of haranguing for being hateful, pharma shills who only want to cut, burn, and poison.
I was extremely fortunate, personally and professionally, to train in two clinical units with strong basic science programs. As such, I worked at the bench with MD fellows and we schooled each other on our respective strengths. I loved when when my colleagues would come back from clinic and tell me of experiences that put our bench work in real world perspective. Yes, not all bench work is immediately…
terrasig | May 3, 2009If you follow me on Twitter (@abelpharmboy) or looked at this post Thursday, you'd know that I was going to a meetup of area Twitter users. I honestly had no idea what to expect and have to say that it was a rather enriching experience. It gave me a chance to press the flesh with a crowd very different and higher energy than some (but not all) scientific gatherings.
The group was different because the people I met were more in the tech and communications biz and the higher energy might have come from that I was probably one standard deviation away from the mean age. Click through the photo…
tetrapodzoology | April 30, 2009As you'll know if you've already seen the announcement over at SV-POW!, my friend and co-author Mike P. Taylor successfully defended his Ph. D. yesterday: congratulations again, Mike. Mike's thesis was titled Aspects of the History, Anatomy, Taxonomy and Palaeobiology of Sauropod Dinosaurs: its contents (listed here) will soon see publication; indeed, some chapters are already published (Taylor & Naish 2007) or in press.
Here, Mike shakes hands with Eric Buffetaut (his external examiner) while a very jovial Andy Gale (his internal examiner; he looks suspiciously like Eddie Izzard in this…
tetrapodzoology | March 24, 2009
Last weekend I did the beach clean-up thing again, and again I went along with my son, my mum (Sandra), and about 40 other people. There's always something new to say about the problem of litter and plastic pollution: once again, I thought I'd pen some random musings on the experience, and on the problem of litter and pollution in general.
There's every reason to be depressed about the fact that, thanks to our species, many environments and ecosystems are royally screwed, but there's hope in the fact that more and more people are at least aware of the situation, and more and more are acting…
terrasig | March 8, 2009I used to keep a separate blog for items of local interest but I can't even keep up with one. So, you'll occasionally have to bear with me posting about issues of import from the area in and around Terra Sigillata World Headquarters.
But here's a local bit of info for our NC Triangle readers that should also remind the rest of you around the world to see what you can do in your own communities, especially during the global economic downturn.
This came across a tag in my Facebook from my far-better half, PharmGirl. I said, "Wow, this is great - where did you get it? Did you write it?" The…
tetrapodzoology | February 7, 2009
I am happy to report that, at 9-43am this morning (Saturday 7th), Mrs Toni Naish gave birth to baby Emma. Things started round about 5am and, needless to say, the entire day has been taken up with baby duties. Some of you might know that southern England has been badly affected over the past week by ice and snow: a pathetic amount, but enough to prevent the movement of traffic and bring the region to its knees. Happily, our early morning journey to the hospital was uneventful and all went well. Anyway, Emma is wonderful and perfectly formed, and so far has slept an awful lot. It's fantastic…
tetrapodzoology | January 20, 2009
Oh my god. Two years at ScienceBlogs have passed, and Tet Zoo has now been going for three years. It all started on January 21st 2006 when, for no good reason at all, I started a blog over at blogspot.com. Yes, Tet Zoo is three years old. Time to look back at the past year of operation.
For starters, should you want to know more about Tet Zoo's origin and history of operation, read Happy first birthday Tetrapod Zoology part I and part II (both at ver 1), and Happy second birthday part I and part II. Last year, I included a 'what happened in tetrapods during 2007'. I'm not going to do the…
terrasig | January 4, 2009I should really save this new item for next week's Friday Fermentable but I was too excited walking back from picking up the NYT and local fishwrapper from the cold, rainy driveway this morning.
Beer enthusiast, brewer, and public policy wiz, Sean Wilson, is staring back at me on the front page of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer as "Tar Heel of the Week," in a Josh Shaffer article entitled, "Brewer to blend mad science, local flavor."
Each week, the N&O recognizes a citizen making substantial and often unique contributions to the state's economy, community, cultural patina, or all…
tetrapodzoology | January 1, 2009No time at the moment to complete anything for the blog, dammit. So only time for a picture of the day. Inspired by recent comments made here about the whereabouts of the Krayt dragon skeleton from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Matt Wedel has done a great job of both identifying the skeleton, and of tracking down its whereabouts. As he explains, palaeontologists have actually located the skeleton before (David Reynolds and Michael Ryan did so in 1995), and it was also 're-discovered' by the Lucasfilm people during the making of Episode II: The Clone Wars. Check out Matt's article on SV-…
tetrapodzoology | December 19, 2008
Several weeks ago, I and a group of colleagues from the University of Portsmouth (Dave Martill, Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing) set off on a trip to the Cretaceous exposures of Morocco. We were to be joined by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin - our team leader - and by Samir Zouhri and Lahssen Baidder from the University of Casablanca. Our primary aim was to discover Cretaceous dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other fossil reptiles, but we were also interested in studying the region's geology, and to learn about the sedimentology, palaeoenvironment and taphonomic setting of the rocks…
tetrapodzoology | December 16, 2008Over the past month Tet Zoo has been totally different. In what way has it been "totally different", I hear you ask. The answer: I have been absent, with all of the posts having been scheduled in advance of my departure. Many thanks to everyone for reading stuff and for leaving comments in my absence. Together with members of a joint team from the University of Portsmouth, University College Dublin and University of Casablanca, I've been exploring the Cretaceous rocks of the Kem Kem Formation in Morocco. We discovered loads of stuff, some of it very significant (in fact the results of our…
terrasig | November 29, 2008Okay, so kill me - I'm posting The Friday Fermentable on Saturday morning. I just couldn't get it together yesterday and the US Thanksgiving holiday has my timing all screwed up.
I noted earlier this week that the proprietors of our community treasure, Wine Authorities, were to be interviewed on the local NPR affiliate, WUNC-FM, in (guess where?) Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Frank Stasio, a remarkable gentleman in his own right, spoke with Craig Heffley and Seth Gross on his noontime show, The State of Things. The interview was preempted Monday by the economy-related cabinet appointments…
terrasig | November 26, 2008The recent passing of Studs Terkel and my conversations with African American colleagues after the Obama victory has given me pause to think about our life stories, especially the life stories of our elders. For example, I lost all of my grandparents before I could get their life stories on videotape, digital recorder, or writing - I also said I was going to do it during some visit home. My grandparents had some incredible stories about The Great Depression, the World Wars, even the history of my hometown that was farmland in the middle of factories only a dozen miles from one of the…
terrasig | November 20, 2008Just a quick reminder of who you're really supporting when you come by and click on this humble blog.
It's no secret that joining Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs.com can bring the blogger(s) a very small amount of compensation based upon grades of site traffic - depending on your traffic, this could be about as much as paying for your monthly highspeed internet connection at the house. But over the course of a year, this ends up being more money than I donate personally to my public radio station.
Anyway, when I started Terra Sig at the old joint and was invited to join Sb, I was in a…
terrasig | November 3, 2008Is snarky honest real-time discussion of a paper's conclusions more constructive to the authors and the larger scientific enterprise than formal, reserved, and staid holding forth in the correspondence section of a classic clinical journal? Fact is that this discussion will be over even before the next issue of the journal comes out.
A really interesting interplay has been ongoing across the sci/med blogosphere following a commentary last Wednesday by Dr Isis on a NEJM correspondence, entitled, "Shifts to and from Daylight Saving Time and Incidence of Myocardial Infarction." (free full text…
tetrapodzoology | September 27, 2008
Here are some neat things I saw this week. You get points for identifying stuff or saying interesting things about it. What you see in the adjacent pictures was visible from my back garden within the last few hours. Amazing stuff, though my rather limited photography meant that I couldn't capture everything that happened. Remember: stuff like this is happening all around you, all the time, every day. You already know that of course, but 95% of the urbanised human population of the world don't know it, and it's difficult to know whether they care, or are interested.
Ooh - neat beasts!…