One of the things that comes up over and over — on this blog, at conferences like DinoCon, on Q&A websites — is how to become a palaeontologist. As I’ve said before (at some length) the way to become a published palaeontologist is to publish papers about palaeontology.
Very nice photo of Alex Pritchard’s Aquilops skeleton from DinosaurSkeletons.co.uk. I am often so far down the rabbit holes of my own work (and given that I work mostly on pneumaticity and weird stuff in neural canals, they are literally holes) that I do a very poor job of keeping up with what’s going on in the broader dinosphere.
Dave Hone and me with a Sinclair brontosaur somewhere in Utah, back in May of 2023. I started my recent UK adventure in the city of London, where my son and I stayed for a couple of days with my friend and colleague Dave Hone and his partner Connie.
In 1962, Richard Frank Kingham — a student at Woodward School Washington, D.C. — wrote a four-page paper, with three further pages of line drawings, about the Early Cretaceous sauropod Astrodon (Kingham 1962). It was published in the Proceedings of the Washington Junior Academy of Sciences (which to no-one’s great surprise does not seem to […]
Where all discerning paleontologists buy road trip junk food. This one is in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. I just got back home after a solid four weeks on the road, an epic peregrination from SoCal to Oklahoma to England to Oklahoma to SoCal. DinoCon 2025 was embedded mid-trip, which is why I haven’t gotten anything about it posted before now. I love driving across the American West.
One often hears it said that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. For example, if you excavate some fossil sauropods and they don’t have preserved feathers, that not evidence that sauropods didn’t have feathers. Oh yes it is. This is an example of a mantra that’s short, catchy, and wrong.
Matt’s staying with me for a few days, and we’re working into the night trying to put a stake through the heart of a long-running project. He just left the room to take a quick break, and I snapped this photo of the work area. We have everything we need!
Matt and I are just back from the first DinoCon, a British dinosaur convention hosted at Exeter University by Darren Naish (the silent partner at SV-POW!) and colleagues.
Click it. Save it. Sorted. #DinoConUK
Straight from Elesevier’s own mouth, in a letter sent by a “Customer Experience Champion” in response to Professor Iris Van Rooij’s enquiry: (This is in the context of scholarly papers being fed to their LLM.) Folks, when you send your work to Elsevier journals, you are literally giving them away. Given them rights that explicitly invite them to ride roughshod over your rights. Is that what you want? Huh? Is it?
Mike and I are working on our respective talks for DinoCon 2025 — a timely concern, since Mike presents next Saturday and I’m on next Sunday. My talk will be an adapted and upgraded version of the keynote talk I gave at the Tate Geological Museum’s Annual Summer Conference last summer.