After a long, long hiatus, I'll be slowly getting back to blogging, hopefully more on palaeo, R and data analyses (and the occasional scribbles and doodles - I won't call them palaeoart!). I shan't go into detail in this post but I spent about 18 months away from academic research, doing data analyses in the private sector as a 'data scientist', a buzz-word profession which has been all the rave for some time now. It was an 'interesting' experience, and one that gave me a lot of opportunities to acquire new skills in the big data arena. But I missed research too much, and I'm now at the University of Reading as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant, doing phylogenetic modelling of trait evolution, primarily using Bayesian approaches (e.g., MCMC). So, this blog will still feature old familiar topics like dinosaurs, sabre-toothed cats, and R, but also a bit more on modelling.