community
terrasig | September 23, 2008As you may have heard elsewhere, the third annual major (and free) US science blogging conference, ScienceOnline'09, began accepting registrations last Monday. The meeting will be held 16-18 January 2009 in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA.
As of 10 am EDT today, there are already 78 registrants on the way to a cap of 225-ish. However, I have noted that only one registrant is listed on the wiki under a pseudonym.
This is a special message to my kindred spirits who write under a pseudonym and are wondering how in the heck they can go to such a great communications extravaganza and bloggy…
terrasig | September 12, 2008I can't believe that it's only been a year.
Back in March I wrote about the importance of local wine shops, community resources just as important as your library or local farmer. Therein I sang the praises of my local heros, Seth Gross and Craig Heffley, proprietors of Wine Authorities in Durham, NC, and their then-recent ink in Food & Wine magazine.
My latest Wine Authorities favorite is an unusual German Pinot Noir Spätlese from Weingut Schäfer in Mettelheim (US$18.99).
Yes. Red. German. A German Rhinehessen red. An overripe red. No kidding.
Their notes, accessible on their…
tetrapodzoology | September 10, 2008
For my shame, I had never been to Ireland prior to last week. That's so crap that I became pretty determined to attend the 56th SVPCA, hosted by the National Museum of Ireland at Dublin, and I'm glad I did. You know, because of the giant deer, hornbills and pliosaurs [montage here shows specimens from the (currently closed) National Museum of Ireland (Natural History). The middle skeleton is a Notoryctes]...
Here I'm going to do a very speedy review of most (but far from all) of the presentations given at the meeting. There was a reasonable amount of non-tetrapod stuff that I won't, of…
tetrapodzoology | September 8, 2008To begin with, I want to thank everyone who continued to visit Tet Zoo while I was away - you managed to keep Tet Zoo in the top 5 on Nature Blog Network - and I was surprised and pleased that several long-running conversations developed in the comments section of the bunny-killing heron article. Awesome, thanks so much. My trip away was great and I had an excellent time, though what wasn't so excellent is that it was literally sandwiched in between two family funerals. I'm ok now though...
For now, all I want to do is showcase the incredible new fossil sperm whale Acrophyseter deinodon,…
terrasig | September 6, 2008If you ever have been so bored as to scroll down the blogroll on the sidebar to the left, you'll see a category of links for "Other Stuff I Care About." The Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLCenter) is amongst that stuff and the renewal form sitting beside me here at the home office tells me I've been a member since 1999.
The SPLCenter is a fabulous organization in Montgomery, Alabama, that was founded in 1971 by the civil rights attorneys, Morris Dees and Joe Levin. Their original mission was to fight racist, Neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic hate groups through litigation that caused the…
tetrapodzoology | August 31, 2008
I'm now leaving, again, this time for SVPCA. I'm hoping that I might be able to do some blogging from the conference, but the last time I said this (the Munich Flugsaurier conference back in September 2007) there was neither the time nor opportunity for it, so don't get your hopes up. Thanks to SVPCA and other matters, I've obviously been unable to put anything substantial on the blog for a while now... making Tet Zoo all too much like a normal blog... and for personal (family-related) reasons, it's been a strange and sad week here. We're all in need of time off that we can't afford to take…
tetrapodzoology | August 22, 2008
Well, what an interesting time I've had. Firstly, many thanks to everyone who left a comment - however silly or clueless - on the 'novel Mesozoic archosaur' I posted here a few weeks ago. As those in the know correctly stated, the cartoons depict the Brazilian Cretaceous theropod Irritator challengeri in its original guise as a gigantic flightless pterosaur. Now known without doubt to be a spinosaurine spinosaurid (Sues et al. 2002), Irritator was - astonishingly - first published (Martill et al. 1996) as a coelurosaur and as part of Tom Holtz's Bullatosauria (a since-disbanded…
terrasig | August 11, 2008After a long sit on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport, I'm home from the ScienceBlogs blogger and reader meet-up. Many thanks to all of you readers who came out on Saturday to meet the bloggers at Social Pub, sponsored jointly by Seed Media Group and NYC Skeptics.
The threatened anti-vaccination crowd did not materialize and I had a delightful time chatting with Dr Val Jones of the Voice of Reason blog, Peter Frishauf, founder of Medscape, one of the Medgadget proprietors, a reader named Dawn whose blog I cannot remember right now, and Steve, a pharma/biotech attorney.
Dr Val was totally…
terrasig | June 8, 2008Apologies for being such a homer with the last few posts (and a couple upcoming) but there have been interesting local happenings of broad interest, especially while I was away earlier this week.
Turns out that the good Senator Edward Kennedy took a foray to the Town-That-Tobacco-Built to have his glioblastoma excised by Dr Dr Allan Friedman. The local fishwrapper covered this while I was away and noted that while Duke is big on tooting their own horns, they kept an unusually low profile with their high-profile patient.
But I actually didn't learn this news until I received an e-mail from a…
terrasig | June 7, 2008Oy vey, am I embarrassed for missing this piece of good news. Last month, Erin Zuiker graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law.
Folks in the local and international science blogging community may recognize that Erin is the better half of Anton Zuiker, science blogger extraordinaire and co-founder with Bora Zivkovic of the former NC Science Blogging Conference (to be known next year as ScienceOnline'09) and leader of the BlogTogether movement.
Conference attendees this past year may not know that Erin Zuiker was solely responsible for securing and…
tetrapodzoology | June 6, 2008
If you're a blogger, then you choose when and how often you blog, what you blog about, and even whether you blog at all. There's no pressure, do what the hell you like. I've always been determined not to do stuff on Tet Zoo that I don't want to. No participation in pointless, boring memes for example. But if people send me books to review then, yikes, I suppose I better get reviewing them...
A recent-ish addition to the Tet Zoo library is Don Glut's Dinosaurs The Encyclopedia: Supplement 5, a 798-page synthesis of new stuff in the dinosaur literature, as of April 2007. Don published…
tetrapodzoology | June 1, 2008
The silence must have been deafening. As - hopefully - everybody knows, during 2007 Spencer Lucas and colleagues at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (NMMNHS) were charged with intellectual theft, of pre-empting the writings of colleagues, and of publishing on material without getting an OK from those based at the repository where the relevant specimens were held (all of this is documented in painstaking detail here). In particular, they apparently pre-empted Bill Parker's in-press paper on a new aetosaur genus, and appeared to take credit for Jeff Martz's re-…
tetrapodzoology | May 23, 2008
I was saddened to learn today of the recent death of elephant researcher and conservationist Prof. Yeheskel (or Hezy) Shoshani: he was severely injured in what is thought to have been a terrorist attack in Addis Ababa (where he worked) on Tuesday 20th May, and died in hospital on Wednesday 21st. Two other people travelling on the same minibus were killed in the same attack and nine others were injured...
I had never met nor corresponded with Prof. Shoshani but have always been a great admirer of his excellent work. He was a giant in the world of elephant research and made an immense…
tetrapodzoology | May 4, 2008
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...
You all know that 2008 is Year of the Frog. As I discussed back in December 2007, tiny sums of money (relatively speaking) are all that are needed to get individuals of many endangered amphibians into captivity, and hence away from the chytrid fungus that is making them extinct in the wild. And…
tetrapodzoology | April 29, 2008
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...
Marc Jones discussed his work on skull shape and feeding behaviour in rhynchocephalians (the extant tuataras and their Mesozoic relatives: adjacent image, from Marc's UCL page, shows Marc with a live tuatara). It is generally agreed among herpetologists that Sphenodon is not, as used to be thought, an archaic relict; a sort of poor relation…
tetrapodzoology | April 28, 2008
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...
Paul O'Higgins took us back to primates. His key message was that two distinct computational techniques used to study anatomy - geometric morphometrics and finite element analysis (…
tetrapodzoology | April 28, 2008
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…
tetrapodzoology | April 24, 2008
Yesterday I attended the Centre for Evolution and Ecology workshop 'Modern Approaches to Functional Anatomy', held at the Natural History Museum (and organised by the Royal Veterinary College's John Hutchinson). Whoah: what a meeting...
Bipedal chimps and orangutans, leaping lemurs, autralopithecines, 'When Komodos destroy', pliosaurs and marsupial lions, hominid wrists, elbows and ankles, over-engineered dwarf elephants, how elephants use their sixth digits, the non-conservativeness of Sphenodon, self-righting turtles, bat canines... and McNeill Alexander! Shock horror, even the talks on…
tetrapodzoology | April 2, 2008
As I've mentioned previously, 'Dinosaurs - A Historical Perspective' happens on May 6th and 7th: pretty soon! This two-day conference will be held at the Geological Society's Burlington House in Piccadilly (London), and we now have all the required information available online: if you're thinking of attending it is mandatory that you check out the circular, look at the programme, and then deal with your booking. Read on for more details...
Events kick off on May 5th when we have a visit to Crystal Palace in Sydenham (trip costs £10). I've seen the Crystal Palace animals several times, but if…
tetrapodzoology | March 29, 2008
I've mentioned on and off lately that Tet Zoo the book is now go. The manuscript is complete, and right now (when not working on other things) I'm dealing with the editorial tidying-up. The book won't, I'm sorry to say, be anything technically new: it's simply a compilation of the better articles from Tet Zoo ver 1, arranged chronologically. And, because of word-count, it only incorporates articles going up to September 2006, so there's still tons of stuff that can be used for later books (should book 1 prove popular enough that others are worthwhile)...
Adapting Tet Zoo articles for a book…