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So I've done the pterosaur meeting; now you all know all about it. But what about the 55th Symposium on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, held at the University of Glasgow between August 29th and September 1st, and described for some reason as 'The best conference ever', I hear you cry? After much deliberation I have decided to do a brief rundown of the tetrapod talks: and my intention is to be as brief as possible about talks and their contents, not to review them at length or properly summarise them. As usual, I regret that I'm only covering those talks that appealed to me…
It's my birthday this week (the 26th), so how timely that that most long-awaited of books - Tom Holtz and Luis Rey's Dinosaurs should arrive this morning (Holtz 2007). This huge, lavishly illustrated work - it's one of those volumes that will get called 'the ultimate dinosaur book' a lot - has been in the pipeline for, I dunno, months and months and months, and I'm very pleased to see the final finished version. After visiting Luis and seeing some of the artwork he was preparing for the volume (see his thoughts here), I previously blogged about it (at ver 1) here and here. The official…
Long-time blog readers will know that I am atrocious at keeping promises. And I will confess that part of the reason for titling an article 'Goodbye Tetrapod Zoology' was to cause a burst of panic, a rash of visitors (the strategy didn't really work: look at the counter... no spike on the graph). In seriousness, fear ye not oh followers, as I will indeed keep the blog ticking over, it's just that the only things I'll post will be short and sweet. And, unfortunately/fortunately, some bits of news come in that just demand a quick write-up... Lurking in the Tet Zoo shadows are a number of…
During recent weeks, I've written on a couple of occasions about my intention to get through the list of long-promised and nearly-finished articles: they include Amazing social life of the green iguana, Beluwhals and proto-narwhals, more on sebecosuchians, Triassic crurotarsans, Whence the onza, vampire pterosaurs, Piltdown, What did a dinoceratan do, astrapotheres and pyrotheres, tortoises tortoises tortoises... the list goes on. Right now I'm going to resist the urge to write a new article about baboons (more on them later), but am instead going to deal with something that needs doing as…
Tomorrow morning I leave for that conference. One last thing before I go... Some of you will know that I am a close personal chum of Mark Witton: pterosaur worker, expert illustrator, meeter of David Attenborough and all round good egg. Mark's astronomical rise to fame is due, not to his visit to the house of Our Majesty, nor to his various appearances in the national press, and least of all not to his half-hearted effort to grow a beard. Rather, it is due to his world-famous ground-breaking flickr site. What started as a random collection of photos taken by an undergraduate student on his…
It started with a visit to the zoo. Those remarkable African birds, the ground hornbills, got me thinking about Dale Russell's hypothetical thought-experiment (Russell 1987, Russell & Seguin 1982): what if non-avian dinosaurs (specifically, troodontid maniraptorans) had not bought the farm at the end of the Cretaceous but, instead, had continued to evolve? One thing led to another and I ended up both disagreeing with Russell's concept of a human-like erect-bodied short-faced flat-footed tailless dinosauroid, and speculating about what - in my view - a 'real' dinosauroid might look like…
Have you ever wanted to know how much gas a sauropod dinosaur might pass in a day? What an echidna smells like when it dies? If it's true that Indian rhinos don't blink? How far a flea might be able to jump in zero gravity? Probably not. But imagine if you did: the good news is that there is now an open-access internet forum dedicated to the answering of your biological questions. It's Ask A Biologist, the brainchild of Dr David Hone of Munich's Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie. Though designed mostly for children of school-going age, Ask A Biologist is open to anyone…
So many of my so-called friends and associates are actually complete and utter *astards. First Matt Wedel goes and wins some coveted award for being a science genius. Now it turns out that Mark Witton and Graeme Elliott got to spend time with none other than Sir David Attenborough when at - cough cough - Buckingham Palace recently. I can only wince and shake my head in disgust. Mark's account of the sorry tale can be found here on his flickr site. Our academic parent and master, Dave Martill, is in India right now putting on the same display about pterosaurs that he did at Buckingham Palace…
I try to not to be too much of a homer here, especially since moving to ScienceBlogs.com. Instead, I have been running a second blog called Bull City Bully Pulpit for items of local interest that our some of the Terra Sig audience might not care about so much. But with the university academic year kicking back in and some other stuff happening here of national and even international interest, I may put up a few things from one of the South's most vibrant small cities and best places to live. I'm also not too much of a political blogger, but the following was just simply too rich not to…
Sometimes, it's just best to leave the truth and sentimentality to the most idealistic among us... Here's a nice Independence Day message from a local boy, one Mr. Greg Randolph, to his grandchildren in 2076.