Guest post: Now is not the time to sell science short

I seem to have drifted into ’science communication’ week rather by chance so this gives me an opportunity to put up this piece my my old friend and developmental biologist Neil Gostling that he recently had published in his ‘local’ newspaper in the US. Here it is in full, but you can read the original and the associated comments here:

Guest post: a new tyrannosaur – Alioramus altai.

Those of you at SVP will have already been aware of this new critter and I get to be smug and say that Steve Brusatte (formerly a guest poster on here with Shaochilong) showed me the photos months ago. However the paper is now out and Steve has been kind enough to write up another post for the Musings on his next groovy Asian theropod. Take it away please:

Guest Post: Writing a press release – a guide for researchers

My recent post on the media coveragea of my paper on theropod feeding generated a huge amount of interest. Of special note by some outside observers were the comments of Charles Q. Choi who had interviewed me for his article on my work, and later dropped into the comments thread to talk about communication between scientists and journalists.  Now Charles has kindly accepted my invitation to return to the Musings and work up his comments into a guest post on advice for researchers writing a press release for the media. Obviously what you want to communicate as a scientist is not always what they want or need to hear, so knowing what the other side consider useful and what is not is incredibly important. Charles is a freelance reporter who has written about science for Science, Nature, Scientific American and The New York Times, among others.

Guest post: Moas are Fossil Vertebrates, but Dodos are Just Extinct

I was checking up on some of my older posts and dealings on various websites an came across this early guest post by Corwin Sullivan from my blogging days on Dinobase and thought it well worth reseurecting here. So take it away Corwin on the boundary between palaeontology and zoology:

Guest Post: Shark toothed theropods in Asia – introducing Shaochilong

I may be headding off to sunny Inner Mongolia, but have left the keys to the Musings behind in the hands of theropod specialist and memeber of the worldwide Bristol mafia, Steve Brusatte to talk to you about a new paper (and a new taxon) we have described with our colleagues (though I honestly and non-self depreactingly didn’t do much of it apart from coming up with the name). Take it away Steve:

The life of a science writer

I mentioned recently a piece in the New Scientist on giant dinosaurs and in my capacity as an ‘advisor’ on the article I exchanged a great deal of information with the author James O’Donoghue on the subject and his role as a science writer. As a result I though he might like to put across a few thoughts about life as a professional journalist in the science field and he kindly contributed this essay on how he fell into science writing:

Guest post: How did pterosaurs extend their wing finger?

There are all kinds of aspects of palaeontology that in some ways we can only guess at how these things might have lived, functioned and behaved as living organisms. However one of the key aspects of science is the ability to make predictions and with careful use of analogy and homology (and of course the fossil record), we can try to work out some of those complexities that otherwise might leave us stumped. My former student Edina Prondvai and I have a new paper coming out in Historical Biology discussing how pterosaurs might have been able to extend that massive fourth finger and keep it stead during flight while minimizing energy expenditure. Edina takes us through it in this guest post:

Guest Post: Miragaia longicollum: a new stegosaur from Portugal

Maragaia filed block. Image courtesy Octavio Mateus

Another guest post for you concerning a recent palaeo paper by the authors who produced the original work. Susie Maidment returns to the Musings (her previous post is here) to bring some extra information on the new stegosaur that has got dinosaur researchers so excited.

In 2005, Octavio Mateus and colleagues at the Museu Lourinha discovered two stegosaur specimens lying close together in a road cut between the villages of Mirigaia and Sobral, close to Lourinha, Portugal. Preparation of the specimens showed the larger of the two to be an extremely interesting find. Elements from the front of the skull were preserved and represent the first skull remains from any stegosaur found in Europe. The articulated neck was almost completely preserved and remarkably 15 cervical vertebrae were identified. Since the axis and atlas were not preserved, the specimen had 17 cervical vertebrae in total: more cervical vertebrae than any other non-avian archosaur except the Chinese sauropods Omeisaurus, Euhelopus and Mamenchisaurus, which also had 17 cervical vertebrae. In a paper published online in Proceedings of the Royal Society B this week, we name the specimen Miagaia longicollum, and discuss the implications of the find.

Guest post: The shape of pterosaur evolution

It would not be a huge surprise if you had missed the release of this paper, since it has only been published online so far, and does not seem to have been picked up by the media or any other bloggers as yet:

Dyke, G.J., McGowan, A.J., Nudds, R.L. and Smith, D. 2009. The shape of pterosaur evolution: evidence from the fossil record. Journal of Evolutionary Biology (Online February 2009: DOI: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2008.01682.x).

The crux of this paper is the idea that, contrary to oft published belief, there was no great battle between birds and pterosaurs in the Mesozoic and that they co-existed with no major ecological problems. My old friend Al McGowan (one of the authors, and a real AAB mainstay) has kindly penned this extended guest post to cover in some detail, what they did, how and why, and what it means.

Pterosaurs and birds not competing. Image courtesy of Todd Marshall, used with permission.

Hello girls!

In our final post in this series my own PhD student Ross Elgin takes us through the work we did (with others I must hastily add) on the aerodynamics of pterosaur crests. This is one of those much discussed but little researched areas with (perhaps ironically) lots of hot air, but little moving air (like in a wind tunnel for example). So read on as we take to the skies with those crested pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs in time and space

Today on the Musings we welcome Paul Barrett to talk about the distributions of pterosaurs in time and space – just when and where are all (yes, *all*) the world’s the pterosaur fossils from? This kind of huge data gathering paper is of immense value to research and this will, I have no doubt, result in masses of new research and renewed interest of pterosaurs (assuming the interest has not already been renewed enough already).

That tricky pterosaurian taxonomy

Today we have Taissa Rodrigues discussing her work on the taxonomy of Brazilian pterosaurs.

First of all, I’d like to thank Dave for his invitation. I have been studying a group of mostly Brazilian pterosaurs, the Anhangueridae (Dave’s comment: part of the ornithocheiroids as recently pictured here with more on pterosaurian taxonomy here), for almost three years now – together with my advisor, Alex Kellner, who in turn described the anhanguerids for the first time together with his advisor. Unfortunately, my thesis topic can be kind of boring for anyone who’s not THAT interested in anhanguerid taxonomy, so on this post I will do my best to tell something a little less restricted.

Overall, Brazilian toothed pterosaurs all looked pretty similar to each other. They had long snouts with sharp teeth, and most probably fed on fishes. They lived on the Araripe Plateau, which 120 million years ago had a very large lake, with an increasingly larger connection to the ocean as time passed by. The Araripe pterosaurs, especially those from the Romualdo Member (or, depending on the author, the Santana Formation), show a remarkable preservation. This enabled some researchers to make inferences on their flight, terrestrial walking, etc. It is then at least curious to think that we know so little about their taxonomy and systematics – in other words, what is an anhanguerid? How are anhanguerid species related to one another? And what about the other toothed pterosaurs from the same deposit?