Well, I’ve managed to fail at my scicomm resolution for the year, which was to write at least one blog post a month. I missed out on September, but I’m back on it in October with an update on what I’ve been up to in the past few months. As some of you know, I’ve … More Early tetrapod feeding
In the series of 150 things about Canadian palaeontology, I haven’t touched on the one thing I work on very much: pterosaurs. This is for a few reasons, one is that I’ve kind of covered this before, but also because there really just aren’t a lot. For this reason, this post is going to be … More Northern pterosaurs – 150 things about Canadian palaeo, part 18
Pterosaur biomechanics is something that I’m obviously very interested in, and the launch of pterosaurs is something that has been heavily debated. Traditionally, pterosaurs were thought to launch like birds, either running on their hindlimbs and jumping, or vertically launching into the air. However, it has been suggested more recently that they may have launched in … More PhD Opportunity – pterosaur launch
Apologies for the title… Anyone who was with me on my last trip to Romania will remember the discussion of the potential for small pterosaurs in the Late Cretaceous, which rapidly turned into the search for “ptiny pterosaurs”. While I’ve always liked giant pterosaurs (who doesn’t think they are cool?!), I’ve recently become interested in … More A ptiny pterosaur from the Late Cretaceous
My six week travels ended last week with a trip to Washington DC, where I attended the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology (ICVM) for the first time. Held every 3 years, it is run by the International Society of Vertebrate Morphology to promote collaboration and discussion between researchers working on several aspects of vertebrate morphology. … More International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology
My initial title for this blog was “Things that people thought were interesting fossils but turned out to be turtles”. Of course, I don’t mean that, I just have had a particularly frustrating few months reading the same undergraduate projects on turtle evolution, so they are not my favourite at the moment…. However… in the … More Misidentified fossils – Turtle edition
I’ve been living in the UK now for 4.5 years. The first year and a bit was on a student visa (very restrictive, not fun), but for 3 years now I’ve been on an Ancestry Visa which is much better. This means that at the end of my 5 year visa, I can apply for … More PhD of travelling! Holy moly
I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog rambling about estimating mass in extinct animals, including talking about the “lightweight” skeleton in birds, pterosaur bone mass, and the likelihood of giant pterosaurs weighing as low as 70 kg. Now I’m going to talk a bit more about this problem, specifically looking at the relationship … More Skeletal mass in birds
The last 2 weeks have been crazy busy and stressful for me, and I’m glad that I can now sit down and relax, and get back to some blog posts! The reason for the stress has been that I attended, and was on the organising committees, of 2 separate conferences: Flugsaurier, a conference for pterosaur … More Flugsaurier and SVPCA
A few months ago I started talking about skeletal pneumaticity in pterosaurs and planned on following it up with this post on quantifying pneumaticity, but a few things got in the way, so here it is. How do you quantify pneumaticity? Most often in bones, and especially in the fossil record, pneumaticity is discussed on the … More Quantifying pneumaticity
As part of my PhD, and with the help of the Geological Association of London, I’ve been fortunate enough to go on several research trips to some museums in Germany including Tübingen, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Munich. Stuttgart and Munich in particular have excellent pterosaur collections, including many historically significant specimens. Stuttgart The Staatsliches Museum für … More Pterosaurs of Stuttgart and Munich
The last post here was on pterosaur skeletal pneumaticity, and while I said I was going to continue this discussion in the next post, I’m going to take a side-road for a bit and talk about my first research paper, which has just come out! It’s still related though, and ties in with these questions … More Pterosaur bone mass
As I mentioned previously, my summer was billed to be a pretty busy time, and indeed it was. I am now back in the UK, and back at work, but I’ll talk a bit about my trip to North America looking at pterosaurs and digging for dinosaurs. My trip to North America started out in … More North American Summer
As promised, here’s another post about what’s happening in my research life. In my last post, I mentioned that I was going to have a crazy busy summer of travelling. Well that has indeed started… First off, I went to Italy for my first European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologist’s meeting. I went a few days … More Italy, Germany, and Pterosaurs, oh my!
So it’s been a while since I got around to posting on my blog… I’ve now been working at my PhD for 9 months (holy crap I can’t believe it’s been that long), and it is going well so far. I got my first paper officially published about a month ago on air space proportion … More PhD Happenings
Musings of a Clumsy Palaeontologist 