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I'm back...

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.

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The difference between Lion and Tiger skulls

A quick divergence from my usual dinosaurs, and I shall talk about big cats today. This is because to my greatest delight, I had discovered today a wonderful book. It is called The Felidæ of Rancho La Brea (Merriam and Stock 1932, Carnegie Institution of Washington publication, no. 422). As the title suggests it goes into details of felids from the Rancho La Brea, in particular Smilodon californicus (probably synonymous with S. fatalis ), but also the American Cave Lion, Panthera atrox . The book is full of detailed descriptions, numerous measurements and beautiful figures. However, what really got me excited was, in their description and comparative anatomy of P. atrox , Merriam and Stock (1932) provide identification criteria for the Lion and Tiger, a translation of the one devised by the French palaeontologist Marcelin Boule in 1906. I have forever been looking for a set of rules for identifying lions and tigers and ultimately had to come up with a set of my own with a lot of help

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