Posts

May 21, 2013

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3:14 PM | Progressive Palaeontology 2013, Leeds, UK

Tweets about “#progpal” Schedule (all times +0 GMT) The full programme, including abstracts, can be found here 09.00 Welcome to LeedsProfessor Jane Francis & Tom Fletcher Session 1 – Reconstructing Life Habits 09.20 Reconstructing Ammonite Life-Habits: A Modern Perspective on a Centuries Old Question Robert Lemanis 09.40 Determining the dietary preferences of the Port Jackson

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12:00 PM | Fighting It All the Way

National Blog Posting Month – May 2013 – Comfort Prompt – When was the last time you did something that made you uncomfortable but was ultimately worth fighting through those feelings? —— This is easy. Last Thursday I went to … Continue reading →

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6:14 AM | Ankylosaur!

This place is going to be Theropod Central for a bit (until the huge volume of ceratopsians kick in), so here’s an ankylosaur to keep things ticking over. As usual, enthralled though I was with the exhibitions, I didn’t pay that much attention to the various signs or details of some of what I was […]

May 20, 2013

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9:01 PM | Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs (a Little Golden Book)

After so many trips back to the '80s and '90s, it's good to return to a book that's properly vintage. Dinosaurs was number 355 in the impressively diverse Little Golden Book series from Golden Press of New York, and was published in 1959. It was a simpler time, when a kids' dinosaur book could be purchased for a mere 25 cents, and palaeoart consisted of lush forests, erupting volcanoes, and giant lizards...all too literally.For you see, while the illustrator William de J. Rutherfoord was […]

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1:00 PM | Comet West

This is my response to today’s Challenge over at the RocNaNo blog. The challenge is to use this note (found in a used astronomy book we recently purchased) to set the stage for a novel. —– The alarm jingled in … Continue reading →

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12:00 PM | Stick Your Neck Out

National Blog Posting Month – May 2013 – Comfort Prompt – How much do you push yourself to leave your comfort zone? —— Ahh. The ever-popular comfort zone. Whether or not I leave the comfort zone really depends upon how … Continue reading →

May 19, 2013

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9:46 PM | Armoring

I have been known to occasionally make some armor. The functional kind. I participate in ‘heavy weapons’ in the Society of Creative Anachronism, which is meant to be similar to what one might experience if fighting with broadswords, or with … Continue reading →

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1:27 PM | Preparation, predation and a missing quarry

I’ve already mentioned that my time in Canada involved a short trip to Dinosaur Provincial Park with Darren Tanke, but we were also out with Mark Graham, a preparator at the Natural History Museum in London. Mark has kindly written up a guest post on the trip and the hunt for the lost Spinops quarry. […]

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5:41 AM | Wooster’s Fossil of the Week: An amphibian from the Permian of Germany

The above skeleton is of the salamander-like Apateon pedestris from the Permian of Odernhelm, Germany. There are just enough of these tiny little bones to show the ghostly outline of this freshwater amphibian. It is our only amphibian fossil at Wooster, and it is another gift from the George Chambers collection. Apateon pedestris is in [...]

May 18, 2013

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5:38 PM | Stink Bug – Chapter 9

The entertainment went on like this for nearly an hour. Sometimes only one Vrr’ak’l would be performing, sometimes as many as ten were leaping and flipping in the air in a mad flutter of feathers and claws. It was probably … Continue reading →

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8:17 AM | More Tyrrell Tyrannosaurs

As you might have already guessed, the Tyrrell is not short of tyrannosaurs and this blog is going to be heaving with them by the end. I mean, this is the second post and I’m still on all the life reconstructions! (and no, we’ve not got to the murals yet, let alone the actual mounts […]

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1:07 AM | Reflections on the Special Olympics

Today my son competed in his first Special Olympics. I admit, I was trepidatious. I know my son is on the Autism spectrum, which is considered a disability. And I know the Special Olympics are for kids with disabilities. Still, … Continue reading →

May 17, 2013

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8:41 PM | GPS Training for Summer Fieldwork

WOOSTER, OH – In preparation for the summer field season, some Wooster Geologists are being trained on new GPS equipment. We learned the importance of thoughtfully crafting a data dictionary prior to heading to the field. Features and attributes were entered into a database that helps us organize our data as we collect it. For [...]

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11:00 AM | Friday Headlines: 5-17-13

Friday Headlines, May 10, 2013 THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES FOSSIL SAVED FROM MULE TRACK REVOLUTIONIZES UNDERSTANDING OF ANCIENT DOLPHIN-LIKE MARINE REPTILES. Ichthyosaurs were marine reptiles (not dinosaurs) that looked superficially like dolphins, the most obvious difference being that … Continue reading →

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6:57 AM | Dear PLOS ONE: time to sort out your multiple review tracks

Here at SV-POW!, we are an equal-opportunity criticiser of publishers: Springer, PLOS, Elsevier, the Royal Society, Nature, we don’t care. We call problems as we see them, where we see them. Here is one that has lingered for far too long. PLOS ONE’s journal information page says: Too often a journal’s decision to publish a paper […]

May 16, 2013

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7:11 PM | Tyrrell tyrannosaurs

And so to the Tyrrell. Well, there’s really quite a lot to come here, from the setting of the buildings, the collections and of course the galleries. As with the Carnegie, it’s going to take quite some time, and so I really do hope people don’t get sick of it, but well, for those who […]

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11:23 AM | Odontocete trifecta in the latest issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

I apologize for the lack of posts over the past month - the last few weeks I have been working furiously in order to complete a long list of manuscript revisions for a long manuscript for the journal Geodiversitas. Additionally, I've been trying to complete a laundry list of collaborations, which are slowly being completed. Now that I have breathing room again, welcome to the 200th post on Coastal Paleo […]

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11:00 AM | Couch Potato

I encourage all you readers to take a moment and check out the new RocNaNo blog. We post daily with writing prompts and tips, and the occasional bit of our own writing. Today’s challenge I posted myself. The challenge is … Continue reading →

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10:00 AM | Carl Zimmer's Feather Evolution video

Science writer Carl Zimmer narrates a recent TED educational video summarizing our knowledge about the evolution of feathers. Part of a lesson at the TED-Ed site and animated by Armella Leung, it's a really well done crash course in current thinking on feather origins. Did you note the derivatives from different pieces of paleoart? The Epidexipteryx is clearly based on the Qiu Ji and Xing Lida reconstruction, and the displaying Caudipteryx is Sydney Mohr's. Those bits aside, I love the way the […]

May 15, 2013

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11:00 AM | My Charlie

Yesterday’s blog prompt was about what someone has done to comfort you. My reaction was that just being there is sufficient most times. I have a friend who always knows when I’m down and insists on being close to me … Continue reading →

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10:00 AM | Vintage Dinosaur Art: Dinosaurs - A Picture Dictionary

Today's featured book is 1990's Dinosaurs: A Picture Dictionary. Featuring evocative artwork by Tessa Hamilton, it features a welcome variety of animals due to its alphabetical imperative - an organizing theme which also forgives some temporally and geographically questionable pairings of animals. It also just so happens to be the book I chose for Mike Keesey as his prize for his second place showing in the LITC All Yesterdays contest. It begins with a brief introduction to dinosaurs, set […]

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4:23 AM | A New Non-mammaliaform Eucynodont from the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina

Martínez, R. N., Eliana Fernandez, E., and O. A. Alcober. 2013. A new non-mammaliaform eucynodont from the Carnian-Norian Ischigualasto Formation, Northwestern Argentina. Revista Brasileira de Paleontologia 16: 61-76. doi:10.4072/rbp.2013.1.05 Abstract - The record of non-mammaliaformes eucynodonts from the Carnian-Norian Ischigualasto Formation is diverse and abundant, including a medium to large size herbivore and small carnivores. Here is described a new small eucynodont from the […]

May 14, 2013

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3:25 PM | Conservation biology – let’s get integrated!

This was initially posted at: http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/?p=600 Conserving our world’s biodiversity is currently one of the biggest challenges we face. I wrote a post recently about some of the issues palaeontologists face when trying to make our science relative to current conservation … Continue reading →

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3:22 PM | Protected: Progressive Palaeontology live Twitter feed [TEST]

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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11:00 AM | ¡Volvemos al campo!

Por que.. desde el 16 hasta el 29 de Mayo estaremos de nuevo en el Yacimiento Paleontológico de Somosaguas. Un año más dan comienzo las tareas de excavación de este yacimiento en el que llevan desarrollandose tareas desde hace más de 10 años. leer más

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11:00 AM | More than Words

National Blog Posting Month – May 2013 – Comfort Prompt – Tell us about a time when a friend comforted you in the past. What did he/she do that made a difference? —— Y’know, most of the time when I … Continue reading →

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10:00 AM | Mesozoic Miscellany 59

Plenty of news about Jurassic Park 4 lately, with the latest latest news being that it might not be happening any time soon. Still, it's inspired a nice flurry of writing among our blogging comrades, and that's a good thing. Matt Martyniuk at DinoGoss wrote about it, with this nice turn of phrase: "it's a bit sad that JP has eaten its own tail and become the self-perpetuating font of inaccurate science the original film was designed to destroy." Andrea Cau doesn't really care either way, and […]

May 13, 2013

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9:48 PM | The Supertree Method

Unrelated administrative note: While revamping my computer set-up, which included complete formatting of my main drive, my wonderfully-curated paper database that I had cumulatively built over 6 years and that contained over 106000 papers got destroyed. The PDFs are unharmed, thankfully, but the actual database sorting them out with proper metadata is gone, and it […]

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9:10 PM | Who owns a peer-reviewed, revised, accepted manuscript? YOU DO!

Suppose that, for some good and sane reason, you need to place a paper in a paywalled journal. You do some research. You write a paper and prepare illustrations. You send it off to a journal, and a volunteer editor sends it out to volunteer peer-reviewers. You handle the reviews, revise your manuscript, write rebuttals […]

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8:47 PM | A Dinosaur’s Unexpected Appearance

Sometimes your research shows up in the places where you least expect it. Seniors at Armour High School–my alma mater square in the middle of Armour, South Dakota (population 699)–have a fun and quirky tradition at graduation. When called …