Ocean Sciences 2010

Hello everyone.

I have finally got my first oral presentation at an international conference. I will be talking about the vaguries of d13C in the Southern Ocean at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, Oregon in February.

I'm wondering if any of you will be attending the meeting.

Let me know

Cheers

Lys

Magical Prehistory Tour

In light of Rachel's good news, I thought I'd also take it upon myself to post an update. Any of you who are on Facebook (which is most of you, I guess) probably saw the updates Graeme (who I suppose I should be referring to as 'Dr. Lloyd' now), Phil (Finches), and I kept posting from across the middle part of the US over the last month or so. We were all in Cincinnati (along with Mark Bell, James Tarver, and Phil Donoghue) for the North American Paleontology Conference. All of us presented talks there, and they seemed to go over very well. After the meeting, Graeme, Phil, and I drove the ~3000 miles to Seattle, which is an excellent trip I would recommend to anyone (you know, with all that spare time and extraneous cash I'm sure everyone has on their hands...). I won't bore you all with endless stories about what we did, but I've posted a slideshow in case any of you are interested.

Hopefully I'll get to see most of you at SVP this September (I've heard rumors of a get-together ahead of time, but who knows if anything will come of that). Also, are any of you planning on going to GSA this October? It's being held just up the road from me in Portland, and while I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I'll be going, a visit to Oregon is another trip I would recommend to anyone.

Hope you all are doing well.

-John

Greetings from Bristol! (but not for much longer)

Hello there chaps and chapesses!

I've got a job! An actual, real, proper job! In Glasgow, of all places. At the Hunterian museum, cataloguing their entire collections (well, writing brief descriptions of the contents of each and every drawer and shelf, to be put onto a google-linked searchable database). Which may not sound much fun, but I'm excited!
I've been scouring flatshare websites, and I'm planning to go flat-hunting up there at the weekend. Got to get a move on, because I'm supposed to start at the end of the month! Eek! Although, of course, being a university-run thing they're very slow on paperwork and I haven't had anything in writing yet! Or been given a firm start date. But I'm being pateint and not panicking yet.

So looks like I won't be going to SVP after all! Or any of the gigs I'd bought tickets for - there's a David Attenborough thing on at the Colston in September that I really wanted to go to! D'you think I can fly down for one evening?!

A New Year and Cold Start!

Hello, greetings and all that jazz.

I am still here in good old .DE and merrily procrastinating my way into the second year of my PhD. First big, proper conference coming up at the end of the month, but I appear to have lost the ability to panic too much anymore.

So what's new? Um, it's cold. In fact so cold we had an iceberg in the harbour at the start of the month. I was going to scan it in, but of course left the article at home this morning.

Not much of an update I'll admit, still just thought I'd stop in and say hi....oh and gloat slightly over the fact I am off to Australia for a month in February...Mwhahahahahaha!

Take care of yourselves

Lys

Merry Christmas, one and all! Does anyone still read this thing?

It sounds like you're all off doing far more exciting things than me...I'm pretty much doing exactly the same as this time last year, the only differences being that I now volunteer in Biology at Bristol Museum (which is fun) since Tim Ewin abandoned us for the NHM (but can't say I blame him!).
My trip to Oz in January/February was amazing, even though I didn't discover anything mind-blowing on the dig...a few scrappy pieces of dino and turtle bone mostly. But it was still pretty damn cool! (even though it was about 35 degrees in the shade!).

Me breaking up some rock. We found a nice big ornithopod femur in this block!

Anyone going to SVP next year? It's being held in our own fair Bristol! Maybe I'll see a few of you there! In the meantime, everyone have a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Rach

Well hello there!

It's been a while since I've put in any sort of update, so I thought I'd bung in a quick post to let you all know what I've been up to. I had a couple of weeks of fieldwork out on the U.S. Gulf Coast in May, and I've spent most of my time since processing samples and doing microscope work. Which has been dull, quite frankly, but the data is now starting to trickle in. I'll be doing a poster at Palass on what I've done so far. And while we're on the subject, who else is going this year? I've taken a room at the Kelvin Hotel, is anyone else going to be staying there?

Other exciting news: for those who aren't aware, next year's Progressive Palaeontology will be in Birmingham. You are all of course cordially invited, although I understand that those in a different timezone may not be able to make the trip. Preparations are going well, but I do find all this teamwork rather challenging. Palass will also be in Birmingham next year, so 2009 will be a bit of a Brummie double-whammy.

My first paper will also be out in December, in the very fine journal Palynology. It's not the most groundbreaking paper ever written, but I'm still quite pleased with it. Has anyone else got any publications in the pipeline? I've enjoyed reading Luke's, Rob's and Koen's papers from their MSc projects, and I'd very much like to read any more papers that get published.

Time to get back to the lab.

Cheerio!

Neil and Cheryl tie the knot

T'was a lovely day and the bride looked radiant. There are a few pics on facebook for all to see. Hope you're all well

SVP

I was just sending in my abstract for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting this year (in scenic Cleveland...ugh...) and was curious whether any of the rest of you had plans to be there. It should be a good time; those of us that were there last year got to see Mike Benton get drunk at the afterparty, which in and of itself was worth the trip (I might also mention that Lara gave an excellent talk and I presented a much less excellent poster). If any of you are going, let me know if you might be interested in working out shared rooms (this seems very early, I know, but I'm told all the double rooms at the host hotel are already booked, and I'm betting that affordable rooms in downtown Cleveland are going fast).
While I'm writing here, how is everybody these days? People so rarely post here anymore, which is a shame, since I always enjoy hearing what people are up to. For my part, I'm getting ready to spend the summer helping to write a grant to fund our university museum and traveling to California to measure horse, dog, and squirrel teeth for my dissertation research. I hope everyone else's life lately has been equally or more exciting (though, really, I'm not sure how anything could be more exciting than fossil squirrel teeth...) and that I'll get to see at least a few of you in Ohio this October!

The demise of Chantry Court.

I thought this might be of interest to some of you who suffered at the hands of Unite Student Housing during your brief but eventful time in the fair town of Bristol. Chantry Court has been struck off Bristol's accommodation list for next year. This is NOT due to the flooding fiasco, the ventilation vexation, the postal palaver or the raucous residents (although the office was staffed by some highly admirable sorts!) No this was due to the infestation of maggots they had all throughout the back entrance because of the overflowing refuse tip outside. Aren't you glad you all moved Koen, Lys, Rob, Ben? I am!!!!

Anyway, I'm utterly bored at work and this was the last procrastination tool at my disposal before giving a resigned sigh and heading off to Borders for 20 minutes. I hope that you are all well and having plenty of success at whatever you're all turing your hands to. I think a reunion might be in order at some point no?

Well, until we meet again (don't know where, don't know when) fare thee well comrades and palaopadwans in arms.

xxx

Merry Christmas and junk

Hi everybody,

Since there is only one post so far for december, I thought I shear up the numbers a bit. Although I'm far from religious in any way (perhaps only when worshiping divine female curves), I do love the whole christmas atmosphere. It is supposed to be the birthday celebration of Jesus Christus, but that was just a smart move of the Catholic Church to absorb the pagan celebrations around that time of year. I like to think of Christmas more as a fertility celebration. The tree is obviously a phallussymbol, and the presents underneath, well I don't think I need to explain what they represent. It's the celebration of the winter solstice, which is actually on the 22nd, and means the beginning of the lengthening of the days. In short, I wish you all a Merry Solstice and a very Happy New Year.

And don't let my obscene thoughts ruine your fun when opening those balls... I mean presents.

Best wishes,

Koen

Stuff and nonsense

Ugh. I had to look at Braddy's smug face on the local news blathering on about his bloody giant eurypterid. That news story was even a question on Have I Got News For You that week. Braddy's practically famous! Though his name wasn't actually mentioned!

Anyway, that wasn't the purpose of this post. Just thought I should say hello, I haven't been here for a while. So hello! Hope you're all doing well with your PhD's or whatever. I'm still working part-time, and volunteering at Bristol museum. Which is fun! Kinda. More excitingly, I'm going to Australia in January! I'm joining a university-run dig near Melbourne for a couple of weeks, and I'm gonna dig up dinosaurs! Hopefully. I went digging in Westbury one day last week with a collector, looking for a plesiosaur skull in the clay pit, and found bugger all! Well, we found a fish, and some fossilised wood, but that's it. The chap had already found the plesiosaur's mandible, a paddle and all of the cervical vertebrae, and all quite well articulated, so he was hopeful that the skull was still there...but no such luck.

So, yeah...digging is the plan at the moment. I'm just trying to get some field experience, really. It was Remmert who recommended the Australia trip to me, 'cause I asked him how one gets into doing what he does for a living, and the advice was basically to get out in the field. So into the field I shall go! Even if that field happens to be an Australian beach, at the height of their summer and the depths of the glorious British winter! It's a hard life!

Hope everyone's OK, enjoy Palass those of you who are going, and see you sometime!


Rach

Braddy's Big Bug

I assume everyone has heard this story by now, but the Braddster has made international headlines this past week by co-authoring a description of a giant eurypterid. I heard a story about it on the radio this morning; they never mentioned Simon by name, but they did talk about his favorite hypothesis, and believe me, it's quite a shock to wake up to a description of mass-molt-mate behavior in sea scorpions...

isotope standards.

hi, this is a purely theroretical query (possibly answered with a simple reference i'm just curious about the histroy and whether there was any thought behind it or if it was simply a case of eeny meeny miney mo.
the isotopic composition of a sample is often expressed as a delta notation relative to the isotopic composition of a standard (e.g. d13C in 0/00)
the standard typically used for carbon is the Pee-Dee Belemnite (PDB). Now this limestone has a relatively high 13C/12C ratio, therefore values of inorganic or organic carbon are mostly negative, i.e. isotopically lighter than the PDB standard.
can anyone tell me why we use the PDB? and also if other standards used (i.e. for other isotopes) also have relatively high or conversely relatively low ratios?

thanks

Lys

Just a comment and another

Hi everybody!

Just to point out that it's not always clear who wrote the comment, I suggest you sign your comment with your name/favourite nickname or some other word that you can be distinguished with. I assume the last comment came from John? Sorry, I really don't know...

Nevertheless, interesting subject, as I'm interested in size increase and decrease as well, but in Sauropodomorpha. The study I'm dealing with now concerns the (formerly) putative Romanian dwarf Magyarosaurus. Now histology has proven they are (were) indeed dwarfs, we can start thinking about the insular dwarfism in these creatures and the palaeobiogeography of Europe in those days. interestingly, it seems there is another somewhat larger taxon amidst the bones. My supervisor and I had a discussion with David Weishampel (still can't believe that the man who wrote the dinosaur bible just let me call him Dave) and Kristi Curry Rogers, and it is possible that this larger taxon infers a peninsular palaeogeography or at least an island with temporary landbidges to the larger continent of Eurasia, resulting in invasions of non-endemic species. It's cool that there is a similar pattern in the ornithopods of Eastern Europe.
More anon. I'm off making some thin sections.
By the way, did you all know that Lara is now doing a PhD in Canadia (with Phil Currie I believe)? Or am I the last one to find out again?

best wishes,

Koenosaurus

Horses and Squirrels and Dogs, Oh My!

First and foremost, (belated) congratulations Lys! Depending on how you figure these things, having been through the Bristol MSc program together makes us all either academic siblings or cousins. Either way, you always like to see your family do well, and the number of people that have gone on to PhD programs from our year is really phenomenal (and, I think, uncharacteristic). I'm sure you'll all agree that this is yet more evidence that ours was the greatest MSc class ever...
Secondly, since the original purpose of this blog was to keep one another updated on what we were working on, I thought I'd announce that I've finally - after several false starts - settled on what exactly I'll be doing for my dissertation project. Most of you are, I imagine, at least vaguely familiar with the mid-Miocene climatic optimum. For those of you that aren't, it was a period of global warming that peaked around 16 million years ago at temperatures that are right around those predicted by several models of modern climate change. Of course, one of the great questions of our age is how climate change can affect ecology, and I like to think that paleontology has some answers. I'll be looking at a transect along the west coast of North America (Oregon-Mexico) for the duration of the Miocene to see if any trends in body size are apparent. I have two hypotheses to test. First, body size within taxa should increase the further north you go, as has long been observed in extant animals. Second, the mid-Miocene climatic optimum should lead to a decrease of body size, a trend which should reverse once steady cooling sets in later in the Miocene. Of course, I can't look at every Miocene mammal out there, or I would be at this forever. So, I spent a good deal of last week leafing through the literature and playing around on MIOMAP to pick three taxa that represent different ecological categories and body sizes and I wound up opting to look at canids, sciurids, and equids. Yes, after my childhood dreams of working on dinosaurs, I'm now looking to get my PhD by studying dogs, squirrels, and horses. That might have bothered me once, but I've now come around to the point of view that the question is much more important than the taxa you use to answer it, and these three families are ideal for looking at ecological changes in the mid-Miocene, in that they all have very good fossil records and very well resolved phylogenies (plus, by studying horses, I get to add my name as a tiny footnote to a list that includes Huxley, Marsh, and Osborn, among many others). I won't bore you all with the methods; suffice it to say I'll be making a lot of trips to California, which is no great hardship.
That's my plan for the next few years; what have all the rest of you been up to?

my fellow palaeopadwans

greetings!

i have been terribly lax of late in
1. keeping in contact with you guys and
2. even checking our palaeoblog. terrible i know but i have justifiable cause...um...i will think of one at some point.

to be honest the green eyed monster was still an intermittent companion and my job was extremely hectic, think department so understaffed we were all doing the work of at least two people (rather reminded me of being back in Bristol!) but enough of the past...i have finally FINALLY returned to the field of academia. in a complete departure from all previous research i am now investigating δ13C of particulate organic material in the Southern Ocean.

it is a situation of complete irony i find myself in as one of the main reasons for taking a job at the Guernsey Education Department was to attempt to get the legislation altered so i could apply for a PhD in Britain.....and having successfully accomplished this (in July NERC published their revised guide accepting students from the Channel Islands) i then applied for and accpeted a PhD in Germany!

i finally arrived in Bremerhaven yesterday evening and have spent today, my first day, in a state of permanent bemusement and a creeping fear that somehow i am a terrible fraud and it is only a matter of time before someone figures this out. however on thursday i go to enrole in my German classes and hopefully things will seem less terrifying from that point on.

i will post a short description of my project as soon as i get a chance to catch my breath, stop panicing and start to reaquaint myself with current research.


Tschüß Lys xxx

Miss you guys

Dear fellow padwans,

It's really been too long, and I'm sorry for not staying in touch. I was caught in the tight grip of the dark side...

It's Friday afternoon, and I'm procrastinating as always (who wouldn't), and I discovered the email (dated somewhere in February) about the palaeoblog. I've been reading all the posts, and thought it is about time I let hear from myself.

You probably all heard I live in 'gemütliches' Bonn now, studying dinosaur bone tissue, and now I can add that my koenosaur (you know, the gliding lizards) paper has been accepted in Palaeontology. Yipeekayay! I have been working my ass off on that one.

Now I can concentrate on cutting up dinosaur bone and grinding it into thin sections. As a matter of fact, I'll be going to SVP in Texas in October to do some more sampling. It would be fab if I could meet any of you guys there. Ben gave away my intention to visit MCZ at Harvard. That wil unfortunately not go trough as they are currently reorganising (new staff) and could not tell me anything better than 'The stuff you are looking for is in South America.' Guess I'll have to go to South America then...
Unfortunately, I don't think I'll be going to Palass this year, as it is turning out a bit expensive (nothing to present, i.e. pay it myself).

Great, the afternoon has turned into an evening, I can go home now... I promise I'll be checking the forum more often from now on (and posting stuff too).

I wish you all the best,

Koenstein

Congratulations Lys :)

About time I hear you cry?

Hello ladies and gents and Emma's bag thing

There's been an awful lot of talk of me and those oranges as well as that picture, but it was a split second moment of madness in a year of, well, utter madness. Such a famous moment is a bit of a double-edged sword really. Funny? Maybe, Embarassing? Very (I was borderline crazy at the time with masters work. I'm sure you can appreciate that). Anyway, since this is my first blog on this thing in almost a year (or maybe over a year?) of its existence, it is surely about time I wrote something down!

So Palass is coming up and who's going? Ceri and me are registered, but it would be nice to see some of your pretty faces there too! Here's a link to some Swedish phrases to learn just so the trip goes smoothly:

http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.17825

My personal favourites are:

jävla idioter - damn fools

and

Jag är snyggare naken - I'm better-looking naked

and

...och det spelar ingen roll ändå om hon ser ganska tjock ut, eller hur? - and it doesn't matter anyway if she looks fat, does it?

but I'm not sure how much these will be needed! Take a look anyway.

Miss you all loads. Take care peeps!

Rob

Silica, diatoms, and grasses

Dear Phinches, Dear All,

I must confess to be astounded (and very pleased) that my little article was noticed, even more so that it was read all the way to the end! I hope this doesn't mean somebody will notice that the latest PalAss newsletter contains pretty much the identical text... Anyhow, I've thought a little bit about the role of plants in general, phytoliths and grasses in particular, in the silica cycle, and am only too happy to take the chance to share my thoughts and ask for your feedback. The short answer is that I think grassland expansion might change the delivery mode of silica to the oceans from a "steady trickle" to a "pulsed" pattern. I am not convinced that grassland expansion could actually increase the steady-state (or time-averaged) supply rate to the ocean. Let me explain why:

Plants can increase silicate weathering locally, and thus the supply of dissolved silica to the oceans, by a number of processes -- mechanical disaggregation of rock by roots, carbon dioxide pumping to the soils, acidity from humic and other organic acids, and so on. This is a pretty well established idea, and Berner used this in his GEOCARB model of carbon dioxide over time to argue for a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide with the rise of land plants in the Devonian. An important point to note, though, is that the silicate weathering rate over geological timescales is controlled (as far as we know) by the Walker feedback -- the temperature-silicate weathering-carbon dioxide feedback -- and plants can only really affect the weathering rate *constant*, not the rate itself. If you like, the feedback stabilizes pushes and pulls on a steady state -- the rate constant (cue plants) affects the tightness of the spring which couples push or pull to the system. If you haven't read the Walker paper, I highly recommend it (Walker, Hays, and Kasting, 1981, JGR vol. 86, 9776-9782). The key point, though, is that this has nothing to do with grasses and phytoliths -- as far as I know, there is no palpable difference between grasses and other plants in the way they disaggregate rock, produce humic acid, etc. to affect silicate weathering rates.

Now, the part that singles out grasses in the silica cycle is indeed the fact that grasses make phytoliths. Some folks have proposed that the evolutionary rise of grasslands to ecological dominance has thus increased the supply of silicic acid to the oceans; an example is the paper on modern plankton evolution by Falkowski and peeps (2004, Science vol. 305, 354-360). The idea behind it all is that grasses accumulate huge amounts of silica (up to around 10% dry weight) in various tissues, a lot of it as phytoliths (little amorphous silica shapes), much more than most other plants today (although some, like the horsetails, accumulate even more). This is, of course, fascinating for its own reasons from the perspective of vertebrate grazer evolution (or coevolution), which Phil can no doubt confirm, but that's beside the point here. The point that is frequently made regarding the silica cycle is that this phytolith silica is of a more soluble form than the silicate minerals from which silicate weathering supplies silicic acid (in part mediated by the processes listed at the start of the last paragraph). This is true -- amorphous silica is at least an order of magnitude more soluble than most silicates. If plants are producing this more soluble form, the dissolution of phytoliths will supply more silicic acid to the oceans (all the time via rivers, of course). However, I have a problem extrapolating from the solubility observation to the idea that the rate of supply can increase. Consider the following simple depiction of the system we're looking at:



Here, the rate of supply to the oceans is F[out]. You can immediately see that, unless the masses of the soil water or phytolith reservoirs change (i.e. violating steady state), F[out] must equal F[weathering]. Now, the size of the global phytolith reservoir is not known, but my own ball park estimate is that it's on the order of 1000 to 10,000 Tmol. Currently, F[out] is around 5 Tmol per year. I take the scenario in which phytoliths formation increases dissolved silica supply to the oceans to mean that F[out]>>F[Fweathering]. If you imagine, for argument's sake, the extreme case where F[weathering]=0, you would empty the phytolith reservoir in, at most, 2,000 years... Clearly, this can't be a prolonged source of extra silica.

What *could* happen, of course, is that the phytolith reservoir acts to modulate (here's where my word choice in the article comes in!) F[out]. What I mean here is best explained by analogy -- imagine a river with a dam (in this analogy, water=silica!). At steady state, with the sluice gates wide open, the river flux above the dam (F[weathering]) is the same as the flux out of dam(F[out]). Now, if you close the dam, either completely for a short time, or a little bit for a longer time, water will build up behind the dam. Eventually, you'll reach another steady state -- either when the water spills over the top of the dam (if it's all closed up), or if the higher water level is pushing the water out faster. Either way, you'll be back to F[weathering]=F[out]. Now imagine suddenly opening the dam back up: for some time, you will have F[out] >> F[weathering], but only until Lake Meade has run dry. Jumping back from the analogy to the silica world now, you could imagine this sort of thing happening on glacial-interglacial timescales (this is Conley's idea now, from his 2002 paper in GBC vol. 16 section 68). Entering into a glacial, silica held in biomass might be released as the climate cools, resulting in a pulse of silica to the oceans, and a period of direct inputs from F[weathering] without going through the phytolith reservoir. In interglacials, inputs might be more indirect. As a lush, grassy vegetation builds up a large phytolith reservoir, most of the F[out] will be sourced from phytolith dissolution, but F[out] would actually have to be smaller than F[weathering] during the accumulation of the reservoir.

Does any of this make sense? I would love to hear your input, feedback, and ideas, and really appreciate your interest!

Best wishes from sunny Cambridge (MA),
- Ben.