Geobulletin alpha

It’s kind of like a turtle-fish-dolphin… 

Close your eyes. Go back in time 250 million years, and the world would seems as strange to you as a different planet. On land, there was a whole host of bizarre and now extinct animals: strange, crocodile-like things, and the precursors of dinosaurs; weird mammal-like beasts, that looked like the lost offspring of a hippo and a monitor lizard. In the seas, marine reptiles dominated. A whole range of unusual animals lived, such as the long-necked plesiosaurs, popularised with reference to the [...]

Darwin, fossili e trasmutazioni 

"I had no idea at the time, to what kind of animal these remains belonged"C. Darwin 1839Durante i primi anni del suo viaggio a bordo della "HMS Beagle", il giovane naturalista autodidatta Charles Darwin raccoglierà un considerevole numero di mammiferi fossili da diverse località nell´Argentina e nel Uruguay. Darwin nota che il suo primo fossile lo trova a Punta Alta il 23 settembre 1832, e l´ultimo nel 1834 a Puerto San Julián. Tutti i fossili raccolti sono inviati verso l'Inghilterra [...]

Mesozoic Miscellany 41 

This was one of those fun weeks in which a massive story about Mesozoic paleontology hits with a huge splash.Xiaotingia, illustrated by Xing Lida and Liu Yi.New research from Dr. Xu Xing, China's preeminent paleontologist, has described a new feathered theropod, Xiaotingia zhengi, as well as proposed a new cladogram which places the new animal, along with our old friend Archaeopteryx, closer to Deinonychus and Velociraptor than to the most primitive birds. Archie's iconic status - one of the [...]

Survival of the Fittest - My PhD Exam Experience 

There was several things that were said to me about the PhD Quaification Exam before, during, and after I took it. These mostly pertain to geology PhD's but may relate to other disciplines. I have heard other stories from other disciplines and other departments though and know that geology is relatively consistent with this. 1. Nobody ever feels like they are doing well.2. It is meant to push you until you break.3. They want to see how much you know, not what you don't know.4. Hahahaha, [...]

New Study Suggests that Turtles are not Diapsids 

Lyson, T. R., G. S. Bever, B. S. Bhullar, W. G. Joyce and J. A. Gauthier. In press. Transitional fossils and the origin of turtles. Biology Letters published online before print June 9, 2010, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2010.0371 Abstract - The origin of turtles is one of the most contentious issues in systematics with three currently viable hypotheses: turtles as the extant sister to (i)

What is on your summer science reading list? 

There is no time like the summer to make a dent in my reading list. I am by no means a speed reader, but during this time of the year I can usually get through the average trade book in about 2-3 days. This year is a little different, though. I am digging deep in my research for my book about transitional fossils (now tentatively called Written in Stone), so this is not the time to get too distracted by titles unrelated to my work. Still, it is good to take a step back and read works that I [...]

Special Issue on Transitional Fossils in the Jornal Evolution: Education and Outreach 

This was already announced on the Vertebrate Paleontology Listserver; however, for those of you who do not subscribe:The new issue of the open access journal "Evolution: Education and Outreach" is now available online here. This is a special issue on transitional fossils an contains articles from a number of specialists on a the origins of variety of animal groups as well as articles

Special Edition of Evolution: Education and Outreach! 

In case you haven't heard, the latest edition of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach is almost entirely about transitional fossils. There's something for everyone, from synapsids to onychophorans, so make sure you check it out! My only complaint, though, is that there is not a paper about early hominins or human evolution. Human evolution is often ignored or given short shrift when we talk about transitional fossils, yet the past several decades have seen an explosion in new types of [...]

O.C. Marsh's Mammal-Like Amphibians 

The skeleton of Inostrancevia, a Permian synapsid from modern-day Russia. From the American Museum Journal. The science of paleontology has long been concerned with searching out the origins of modern groups of animals, but at the turn of the 20th century there were frustratingly few transitional fossils. That evolution had occurred was generally agreed upon, but where the transitional forms might be found, what they would look like, and what mechanisms drove their evolution remained [...]

George Berkin "don't know much [about] biology" 

If you want to aggravate an intelligent design advocate all you have to do is point out the obvious. Everybody knows that intelligent design is just warmed-over creationism, but some creationists love trying to create a false dichotomy between the two in an attempt to appear more respectable. Creationism starts with the Bible, they say, while intelligent design starts with science. Nevermind that the most vocal advocates of intelligent design are evangelical Christians or some other flavor of [...]

4th Annual Earth Sciences Colloquium 

More on Puijila later on this week - don't worry, I know its a hot topic, and I love seals, but I'll post on that later.Last weekend I participated in the 4th annual Earth Sciences Colloquium, a student research conference done in our department for students and organized completely by studets (go us!). In any event, I helped out quite a bit with it, and (gasp) was the technical chair for the conference - I communicated with all the presenters, organized the technical program, and moderated the [...]