Raptor's Nest

I have been too busy lately. Firstly because I started a postdoc and settling down etc takes up some time. But also, I've been revising a manuscript on dinosaur jaw biomechanics that came back from review; I am currently struggling with a method new to me that one of the reviewers suggested I use. But before all this happened, I was pretty much occupied by this single paper that finally came out online: Phylogenetically structured variance in felid bite force: the role of phylogeny in the evolution of biting performance. I checked the dates on this submission and it was received by the Journal of Evolutionary Biology on 22 January 2009, and accepted 30 November 2009, but didn't become available on EarlyView until 14 January 2010. The actual print date is March 2010. So a year since submission. And three rounds of review in between. Phew. This was based on a chapter from my thesis that I thought was fairly robust and well-written that it would be the easiest chapter to conv...

I am going to veer off from my usual (but infrequent) blog posts on palaeontology and blog about another geeky subject. Star Wars. I've been a big fan of Star Wars ever since I was a little boy - Return of the Jedi must be the first film I remember seeing at the cinema; my dad took me to see it when I was three but all I remember was being freaked out by Jabba the Hutt and I went through the rest of the film asleep as a sort of a defensive mechanism. When I was a teenager, I read Kevin J. Anderson's "Jedi Academy Trilogy" then went on to read Timothy Zhan's "Thrawn Trilogy", and from there, I pretty much read every single Star Wars related novel - until I got bored after the story arc reached a time period around 20-25 years since the events of R eturn of the Jedi (by this point I thought it became pointless to continue reading...). Anyway, there is one thing that has been bugging me since I was a teenager: when reading through Star Wars materials, I f...

Despite the complaints that I've heard about the hills and distances from one session to another (come on, it was only a few minutes by foot!), SVP this year was pretty good, in my opinion anyway. I noticed some really good talks with some impressive analytical methods, some really interesting posters, and I also chatted with some intelligent and enthusiastic people. Of particular interest for me was the Romer Prize Session - not only because I was presenting, but more because Romer Session talks were almost always of high quality research, self-contained and conclusive (unlike some "on-going research", a new locality, or some more scrappy fossils...). Romer talks tend to be more analytically/numerically oriented so there are some stats and numbers to support certain ideas and claims. There were two talks in particular that I liked, one by my very good friend Tai Kubo (Evolution of limb posture in terrestrial tetrapods inferred from Permian and Triassic trackways), and ...

I've just noticed that it's been about four months since I posted my last blog entry...It is rather scary how time seems to fly even when you are not necessarily having fun... Anyway, I thought I might as well advertise this. In the upcoming SVP at Bristol, I shall be giving a talk in the Romer Session: Myology and functional morphology of biting in avian and non-avian dinosaurs. It's mostly about non-avian theropods now but I have a couple of birds in there for comparison; I don't know now why I emphasised birds in the title, I could have just said dinosaurs... Perhaps it's because I made much of my myological observations in birds (but also a few crocs). I shan't write too much about it here, but the work is basically a suped-up version of my Masters thesis from way back, almost six years now... I had to come up with a way to rescue the concept if not the work, after I'd realised I had some fatal flaws in the basic assumptions of the calculations in my Ma...

My coauthors and myself recently submitted a manuscript in which we deal a little with phylogenetic constraint. In the process, I came across something interesting and I thought it would be worthwhile to share it here. Phylogenetic constraint is a concept of evolutionary biology that has had quite a lot of discussion. Mary McKitrick (1993) has a great way of introducing the concept of phylogenetic constraint: "in some sense, all evolutionary studies implicate phylogenetic constraint, and reviewing the topic is like trying to catch a greased pig." How eloquently put. It means everyone loves talking about phylogenetic constraint but it just goes all over the place and there is no real consensus on what phylogenetic constraint is. So despite all this widely held discussion, phylogenetic constraint remains one of the most difficult and least understood subjects, and possibly one that is actually ill defined as well. The problem is, when we talk about phylogenetic constraint, w...

I had an interesting experience yesterday - spent a good few hours on a silly problem. You don't need to know the technicality of the analyses at all, but I'm sure you'll appreciate the humour in this. I am frequently running principal coordinate (PCo) analyses recently. This is because I am using an interesting application of multiple regressions and PCoA on phylogeny vs phenotypic variables called the phylogenetic eigenvector regression (PVR; Diniz-Filho et al., 1998; Desdevises et al., 2003). In short, you take a phylogenetic tree of a given group of animals (or plants, or whatever your favourite group of organism), reduce the complex topology into manageable columns of numbers (by PCoA), and test these columns with some phenotypic/ecological variable of your choice for any correlations using multiple regression. Sounds pretty easy, and it is, in practice at least. You can code R to do this very efficiently, if you know the R language already. Anyway, yesterday, I r...

I just read an interesting BBC News article . Apparently, a chimpanzee at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden had been storing hundreds of stones in anticipation of throwing them later at the zoo visitors. Planning ahead is a cognitive behaviour that has not been traditionally associated with nonhuman animals. This behaviour was observed over the last decade and reported in the journal Current Biology . Previous reports of planning for future states in animals were all experimentally induced and as such one can be skeptic about these behaviours as being potential lab artefacts. However, this zoo chimpanzee showed spontaneous planning that provides support that previous observations made in the lab may not necessarily be artefacts of experiments; at least in great apes. Primary evidence for this is: that the chimpanzee had collected stones or made concrete discs (see below) early in the morning before the zoo was opened to the public but never when the zoo visitors were present; that the chi...