Raptor's Nest

Palaeontologists have commented a lot on the inaccuracies in Jurassic World , so I'm not gonna repeat that here. What I want to do instead is to provide my ideas on how the concept of Indominus rex could have been better, in my eyes. I actually don't really like the idea of genetically engineering a hybrid dinosaur - that kind of goes against what made the original Jurassic Park  (both novel and film) so "magical" (for want of a better word). As a kid enthusiastic about dinosaurs, the idea of bringing dinosaurs back to life from fossilised DNA was really breathtaking and exciting (yeah, yeah - they weren't real dinosaurs because their genome were augmented with amphibian DNA, blah, blah), but the core concept was that resurrecting past life may have unpredictable and undesirable consequences - like  JP  staff not being able to control their dinosaur population despite their genetic engineering - "life finds a way". So in that vein, I would have made...

From Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) This blog post is way overdue, being mostly written months ago in late Oct. Anyway, it's a bit technical - but it relates to how palaeontologists quantify biodiversity through time (like the famous Sepkoski curve shown above). I have a newish paper ( ‘Residual diversity estimates’ do not correct for sampling bias in palaeodiversity data ) in Methods in Ecology and Evolution,  with Chris Venditti and Mike Benton, that became available in  Early View version  in Oct last year (24 Oct 2016). The paper is very simple and straightforward. In it we assess a popular method that has been used numerous times to 'correct' for sampling bias in palaeobiodiversity data. It is safe to say that most palaeontologists would agree that the fossil record is far from complete and that any kind of tallying of the numbers of species that were present in any given time period would suffer from this incompleteness - biodiversity curves (such as the ...

There is no dispute that non-avian dinosaurs went extinct at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, most likely owing to a large asteroid hitting the Earth, but what has been debated for decades is whether dinosaurs were reigning strong up to the end of the Cretaceous, or whether they were already in decline and were on their way out only to be killed off by the asteroid impact 66 million years ago (Ma). That is the question that Mike Benton, Chris Venditti and I hopefully helped resolve with our new paper that came out electronically Monday in PNAS. The paper is pretty straightforward, and we provided lots of details in the supplementary information, so it shouldn't be a difficult read. Please do have a read . Below I provide a brief summary. 1. Previous studies The majority of previous studies dealt with counting the number of dinosaur species in geologically defined time bins (such as geological stages), charting the resulting diversity curve through time, and making ...