Raptor's Nest

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 ...

I thought I'd do a fun post for once. And since list based articles are the norm for fun on the internet, I thought I'd do one on dinosaurs, but given that I know most about theropods, I've decided to restrict my list to theropods (...maybe in a future post, I'll do other clades). My ranking is based mostly on scientific importance so it may not reflect awesomeness, and it is obviously subjective as to how I rank importance to science. For instance, interesting discoveries or unique palaeobiology are ranked relatively low compared to wealth of information and data or completely revolutionising our understanding of the evolution of theropods. So here are my top 10 scientifically important theropod dinosaurs of all time (off the top of my head) 10. Megalosaurus Being the first dinosaur to be named, Megalosaurus automatically deserves a spot on this list, but given the fragmentary nature of known fossil specimens, and being mostly useless as a meaningful source ...

It is probably safe to say that to many, the idea that dinosaurs were slowly in decline , or that they weren't 'evolving' as fast as they should have been, is an uncomfortable thought. I thought some context will make this idea easier to appreciate. Palaeontologists are generally happy to say that Velociraptor is a very close relative of birds. It is morphologically very similar to birds, and there is even strong evidence that it possessed secondary feathers on its forearms ( Turner et al., 2007. Science 317 : 1721 ). Velociraptor lived during the Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous, 83.6 - 72.1 million years ago (Ma). Velociraptor from Wikimedia Commons On the other hand, the oldest bird known to date, Archaeopteryx , is known from the Tithonian Stage of the Late Jurassic, 152.1 - 147.7 Ma. Archaropteryx as a Blue Jay Archaeopteryx with red plumage So that's on average about 72 million years (Myr) between these two dinosaurs, with a...

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 ...

While it was not the main focus of their paper, Persons and Currie (2016) , in a recent paper in Scientific Reports hinted at the possibility of Nanotyrannus lancensis being a valid taxon distinct from Tyrannosaurus rex , using deviations from a regression model of lower leg length on femur length. Similar to encephalisation quotients , Persons and Currie devised a score (cursorial-limb-proportion; CLP) based on the difference between the observed lower leg length and the predicted lower leg length (from a regression model) expressed as a percentage of the observed value. The idea behind this is pretty simple in that if the observed lower leg length value is higher than that predicted for its size (femur length), then that taxon gets a high CLP score. I don't particularly like this sort of data characterisation (a straightforward regression [albeit with phylogeny, e.g. pGLS] would do the job well), but nonetheless, Persons and Currie found that when applied to Nanotyrannus , it...

I suppose it's rather late to be commenting on a film from 2012, but I just recently came up with a reason why I didn't like the film Prometheus . Or at least one reason... When Prometheus came out, all the critics and many fans on the internet praised how the film asked big questions . I never got that. To me Prometheus didn't ask big questions, it only pretended to do so. For instance, it is made pretty blatant in the film that characters in Prometheus  are asking about where we come from. Were we created by a superior alien race? The answer is given to us right at the beginning of the film. So, yes. According to the opening sequence, the 'engineers' seeded the building blocks of life on primordial planets, presumably including Earth. We're given an answer even before anyone on screen asks the big question . Surely, this pretty much negates the whole purpose of having a big question  in the film... Also, films that really do address big questions ,...

The title says it all... But to reiterate: Why did Jurassic World, supposedly the world's biggest theme park, hire a former Navy Seal to train their velociraptors? Could they not attract the top expertise in animal training? Or any of the surviving Jurassic Park veterans? Or was Owen Grady THE top raptor trainer in the world? I am confused. I liked Owen Grady as a character; he was funny and charismatic. And I enjoyed Chris Pratt's portrayal of Grady. But suspension of disbelief went flying out the window as soon as he was revealed to be a former Navy Seal and not Steve Irwin...