Progressive Palaeontology (ProgPal) is an annual event where early career researchers get to demonstrate their research to an equivalent audience in a reasonably informal atmosphere. It’s also renowned as a mega p*ss-up, as everyone knows palaeontologists are chronic alcoholics (hence the dinosaurs with feathers hypothesis). This year, it was in the vibrant and cosmopolitan northern UK city of Leeds. Some of the research communicated there was pretty freaking sweet. You can find recordings of all of the talks on Palaeocast (at some point in the future), and the Twitter feed was #progpal if you want to see a historical live version of the event.

For me, it was a chance to catch up with some buddies in the field (Imperial Colleges is quite devoid of palaeontologists), and hear what the latest developments in the field were. As a member of Palaeocast, it was also a chance for us to test our live-stream capabilities (great success!), and broadcast some awesome science to those outside of the conference.

Chaaaarge! Conference photo, and sneaky Palaeocast plug (click for larger)

The sessions were divided into four themes: reconstructing life habits; palaeoenvironments; vertebrate evolution; and exceptional preservation. It all started off pretty much with everyone complaining about how hungover they were, following the epic ice-breaker the night before and a storm of Belgian beer, and generally being furious about the lack of morning coffee.

Life habits

So the opening session was a bit of a blinder (in no way biased by the fact that my presentation was part of it). Reconstructing ancient modes of life and ecologies is one of the most difficult tasks palaeontologists face, as obviously observations of life is impossibru for fossils. Robert Lemanis kicked things off discussing the mechanics of buoyancy in ammonites compared to their extant analogue, the Nautilus. CT-scanning (also making an appearance later in David Button’s talk) was used to generate 3D models of ammonites, including all their internal nasty parts (mostly empty chambers – all the tasty stuff decayed millions of years ago), and showed that the buoyancy parameters changed during ontogeny (developmental growth) which may have influenced which part of the water column these ancient critters lived.

A head-scratchingly good 3D model of a Nautilus - 3D seems to be all the rage these days, for some bizarre reason.. (click for larger)

Laura McLennan followed this with a pretty awesome talk on modelling the feeding ecology in extant sharks, in the hopes of developing a model that we can use to determine what ancient sharks ate (shells, fish, other sharks, children), which may provide a rigorous ecological factor to compare to their historical diversity. Laura described the pinnacle of her research as “in progress”.

My talk was next on some research I’ll be publishing soon, and will write up a more comprehensive blog post to accompany the article closer to the time.

David Button, sauropod wizard, claims that he found “evidence of differential biomechanical partitioning relating to ecological specialisation in sympatric [co-occurring] dinosaurs; which is nice in a clade where cranial complexity is often overlooked”. A method called finite element analysis, often used in engineering, can be used to look at the variations in stress between skull bones, and you can even map muscles on to the skulls if you can identify where the attachment points were. Using two well-known sauropods, Camarasaurus and Diplodocus, both from the Upper Jurassic of North America, David showed that the two had different stress distributions within their skulls, and that Camarasaurus may have been a more generalised forager. Kind of like a PhD student.

David Button feeding the sauropods (click for larger)

Palaeoenvironments

The evolution of past climates and environments is essential for understanding how they will respond in the future, and providing baseline models for ‘natural’ variations.

Alexandra Lee kicked off the session with her investigation into how angiosperms, or flowering plants, first originated and in what kind of habitats. Molecular data using modern angiosperms actually is not in concert with what we know from fossils, so determining the precise date of their origin is a bit of a mystery at the moment. It has actually been suggested that the onset of more advanced feeding mechanisms or increasing biodiversity in dinosaurs drove the initial angiosperm radiation, so will be interesting to see how this research plays out in the future. Here, Alexandra developed a new model that showed that early species of angiosperms had the capacity to adapt within many different types of environment, including those either shaded or in full sun. It provides another piece to the ever-developing puzzle of angiosperm origins.

We then time-warped into the Pliocene, much closer to our time, to look at what ancient soils can tell is about past climates, and filter that into how we predict future aspects of climate change. Matthew Pound developed a new model that explained regional changes in the local climate and vegetation, providing important details on the feedbacks that climate change can have, particularly in areas like North America and southern North Africa.

Dino cake!!

Nicola Clark took us on a historical tour of some of the fossils mentioned in Charles Darwin’s logs of his travels on The Beagle, namely huge molluscan assemblages down the coast of South America. These fossils contain a huge wealth of palaeoclimate data, particularly about seasonal variations in the East Pacific during the Neogene period. Preliminary data suggests that the climate state during the Pliocene was much warmer than modern times.

Vertebrate evolution

The afternoon session kicked off with a ‘mini-symposium’ on vertebrate evolution. Quite a hot topic, given that it deals with everything from dinosaurs to us!

Joe Keating, co-producer of Palaeocast, gave a lovely account of his early PhD research into early vertebrate skeleton development. He’d used techniques ranging from standard optical microscopy all the way through to x-ray synchrotron tomography (hardcore – pretty much a particle accelerator). Looking at ancient fossils, he was able to develop an image of the development of bone, as a series through developmental growth. Plenty of scope for developing this with other primitive vertebrate groups, such as jawless fishes.

Joe taking us deep into the development of the early vertebrate skeleton (click for larger)

The link between dinosaurs and birds is one of the most stunning tales in evolution, ever. Mark Puttick described modelling work he’d conducted as part of his PhD on the relationships between bird-line dinosaurs (Maniraptora) and more derived birds (Paraves). Rather awesomely, he found a huge difference in the rates of body size evolution between the two groups, and a transition in the relationship between forelimb and hindlimb length which probably relates to new adaptive functions as birds began to take to the skies.

Mark demonstrating some of his comparative evolution skills off between dinosaurs and birds (click for larger)

Sticking with the big guns, Gabi Sobral dug deep into early tetrapod relationships (Neodiapsida), picking apart some of the issues we have (hint: there are many) in accurately reconstructing the relationships between some of these enigmatic species. Luckily, CT scanning comes to the rescue again! (palaeontologists are great at stealing techniques from other sciences – “multi-disciplinary”..) Gabi CT scanned the skulls of some wild-card taxa, such as Elachistosuchus huenei from the Triassic of Germany, to have a look at the morphology of the braincase and see what new information this can provide. Gabi thinks that the biggest issues we face with reconstructing neodiapsid (the non-mammal line of reptiles) phylogeny from fossils are “people choosing clade occupation before running analyses properly which biases taxa selection, and that people have been using the same characters on this since about the 1980s, when really a lot of revision is needed.”

Taking it back to the seas, Tom Stubbs explored the radiation of marine reptiles (things like ichthyosaurs, placodonts and plesiosaurs) during the Triassic period. What he found was that morphological diversity and biological diversity were largely decoupled throughout the Triassic: “you find a relatively rapid proliferation of lower jaw shapes early in the Triassic, but the maximum levels of disparity are found in the Carnian when the diversity was in decline.”

Exceptional preservation – it’s gut instinct

Sometimes, the fossil record gives us mind-blowingly awesome glimpses into lost worlds ancient ecosystems and the organisms that lived in them. These are termed fossil lagerstatten, and represent rare cases of exceptional preservation, with intricate details of soft tissues usually preserved.

Peter Adamson took us on journey into the murky Precambrian world of acritarchs – these are enigmatic li’l microfossils, with a pretty complex evolutionary history. There was also an acritarch shaped like a guitar. Awesome. Congrats to Peter too for winning the best talk of the conference! Acritarchs are actually organic-walled microfossils, and at the moment palaeontologists have no idea where they fit into the tree of life. I asked Peter why acritarchs are important for palaeontologists, and he replied quite soberly saying that “they’re probably the only fossils we can use to confidently assess biostratigraphy during the early Ediacaran [the period just before the Cambrian 635-541 million years ago]”.

Cool li’l things, but I’m still not sure what they are exactly!! (click for larger)

We skipped over to Greenland after, with Katie Strang looking at fossils associated with the Cambrian Explosion with exquisite soft-bodied preservation. These fossils were from the Sirius Pass (why so Sirius?), and may be comparable in the way they’re preserved to the infamous Burgess Shale locality. Rather neatly, this combines aspects of geology to determine the depositional setting that the fossils would have lived in. Combined with geochemistry, Katie explored the elemental distribution of rock samples here to decode how the fossils there are so beautifully preserved. We also finally got a question from Twitter at this point, from the USA!

We went to a place where I grew up afterwards, to Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire (I didn’t grow up *in* the forest), looking at what some of the bizarre Ediacaran fossils from there are – a picture complicated by the lack of modern analogues, and preservation as impressions in the rocks. Charlotte Kenchington led us through the bewildering array of forms, things which resemble ferns and bushes, dumbbells, and even Basil Brush! Another researcher, Renee Hoekzema, is assessing patterns of their morphospace, and thinks that there may be more to their ecological complexity than a superficial analysis may reveal..

One of those weird ‘Basil Brush’ fossils (click for larger)

Time ticked by ludicrously fast, and all of a sudden we were at the final talk!

Oliver Knevitt gave an account of how the manner in which types of fossils decay affects how we interpret them in terms of their evolutionary relationships. It was pretty terrifying, as when you look at how types of crustacean (phyllocarids) rot over time, the way in which they preserve different aspects of their bodies change, and particularly with respect to evolutionarily significant characters. I asked Oliver why he decided to study the decay of fossils: “it’s a completely overlooked aspect of fossils – we forget that these were once animals and carcasses before actually becoming fossils. If we want to find out how the fossil is linked to original organism, it’s imperative that we understand how rotting affects our impression of it.”

And there you have it! The latest hot-of-the-press palaeontology from aspiring Dr. Alan Grants, and hopefully a flavour of what’s to come in the news over the next few months. I guess if any of these snippets sound interesting to you, the researchers will be more than happy to go into more detail should you wish to contact them.

To top it all off, Palaeocast acquired an exotic new fan too!

Conserving our world’s biodiversity is currently one of the biggest challenges we face. I wrote a post recently about some of the issues palaeontologists face when trying to make our science relative to current conservation management and biodiversity issues (and have written elsewhere about this too). This is very much a developing issue within which palaeontology is framing itself, as with ever squeezing science budgets around the world, scientists are being forced to find the hook or application that makes their research ‘relevant’ to broader society. The role that palaeontology can play for both climate change and biodiversity patterns and processes is the natural progression of science accompanying such shifts.

But is it such a simple case that if palaeontologists (or palaeobiologists) start working with ‘neontologists’ and conservation biologists that all of a sudden, bam, a solution for models of animal conservation will spring out of the ground? Unlikely. A new study, however, has demonstrated how if researchers from the fields of history, archaeology, geology, ecology and palaeontology all group together and pool our knowledge and understanding, we can begin to produce sophisticated designs and models that will more confidently guide our ability to manage biodiversity and mitigate the threats global biodiversity currently faces. This seems to be an ongoing theme in research nowadays – it’s no longer within the interests of science to be approached from a ‘divide and conquer’ frame from the different fields, but to work together and utilise the different strengths, and plug the weaknesses, of the different fields to resolve a problem with a multi-pronged approach. Science is stronger if it presents a unified, coherent, and directed front.

Anyway, the research! What did they do, and why.

One of the fundamental aspects of conservation biology is to establish ecological baselines that represent the background conditions of speciation, extinction, and resource management (community structure). This provides a reference system which can be used to detect deviations from ‘normal’ ecological patterns and processes, and gives insight into the longer-term dynamics that affect biological systems. For this, you need to reconstruct historical trends, which obviously you need a history for!

This is where history, archaeology, and palaeontology come in – all offer different perspectives on historical events, including how ecosystems have changed, which when bound can offer a coherent insight into how ecosystem management could and should be approached now and in the future. What they also offer, importantly, are different perspectives on ecosystem variation both without and under the influence of humans. This is crucial for peering through the miasma of invariably negative impacts that we have personally had on global ecosystems. The three also offer differing perspectives on time: history and archaeology are both about change on a human time-scale or less, whereas palaeontology usually reveals changes to us on orders of magnitude longer than this, sometimes up to several millions of years. So this interdisciplinary marriage can reveal to us different patterns that we might not be able to detect using just a single approach.

The challenge this all faces then, is how best to integrate these fields as to be most effective in combating ecosystem decline and conserve what has been shifting, but present, for millions of years instead of it disappearing in the blink of a geological eye. The authors argue that the concept of historical ecology can help to unify palaeontology, archaeology, and history with conservation biology, to address the factors mentioned above. The breaching and transcendence of “disciplinary boundaries” (I’m not sure what these are really) can lead to the genesis of methods that incorporate all applicable data, and recreate for us images of ecosystems past, future and present.

Now, this isn’t to say that dinosaurs, combined with the history of the Ancient Egyptians is going to help inform us how to conserve wetland ecosystems. Data is sparse, and needs to be focused and interconnected and driven by collaboration. The case study the authors use to highlight this, is the oh-so-thrilling eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) from a fishery in Chesapeake Bay, USA. These oysters are actually quite important members of their ecosystem, helping to regulate the water quality and trophic structure (food webs) within the bay, since its formation some 8000 years ago.

A reef composed of the Eastern oyster (source)

How have the different fields been used to inform management decisions within a historical ecology framework in this case? Let’s start with the rocks and the stuff that used to be alive. For 40 years now, the sedimentary and palaeontological records have been analysed (on a geological time-scale), and reveal a pattern of increased sediment and nutrient flux into the sea, that produced vast blooms of algae, and a seasonal change in the stratified ecosystem structure and oxygen conditions in the bay. These are big, long-term patterns with high-impact processes driving them.

Historically, these oysters have actually taken a bit of a buggering. Unsustainable harvesting, combined with an increased sediment load creating nasty conditions, and disease, created a triple whammy of oyster-antagonistic conditions, leading to a decline in their abundance. This led to an attempt to repopulate them  by creating new oyster reefs, but this was hampered by other activities in the Bay. However, with some of this activity, came information. The Bay was being monitored, including the sea-floor, which provided a historical sequence of its structural evolution of the Bay, including the productivity and distribution of oyster reefs since the late 1800s. Interestingly, researchers working on this issue recently began to incorporate social and cultural information into their assessments too, by surveying and assessing the interests and targets of different stakeholder groups (those with an active interest in the Bay), including scientists, the fisheries, and the local public.

This holistic approach may seem quite data intensive, but it is more the breadth than the depth of information that is providing the most use. Questions are left from gaps in the data, simply due to the lack of complete geographical records through time, such as how have location, salinity, and nutrient supply all impacted upon oyster growth rates through time in different areas of the Bay? How did this change when the harvesting switched from Native American methods to the larger-scale clearances by European settlers? The answers to these questions are patchy, but of critical importance to disentangle the various human impacts from background trends. Some geography-dependent shifts can be detected using limited historical samples, but these are not applicable to the whole Chesapeake Bay population due to the naturally different microclimates and environments they live in.

(A) Pleistocene oyster reef deposit, Virginia, and close-up, (b) Late Holocene prehistoric archeological deposit of oysters collected by Native Americans and close-up, (c) living oyster reefs exposed at low tide and close-up. (source)

In specific parts of the Bay, archaeological trends do hint at a pattern of declining reef rate, however, shifting from 10mm/year up until AD 1000, then 5mm/year from then until 1855. Doing a bit of oyster-related maths with this shows this is roughly the equivalent of losing 9000kg of oysters per acre from the Bay, which unfortunately current restoration efforts do not come close to replenishing. So the ecological baseline has been set, albeit probably not representative of the whole Bay, and demonstrates where current targets lie for maintenance of this important ecosystem.

Unfortunately though, this baseline is not representative of a non-influenced ecosystem: it’s actually a prime example of “shifting-baselines syndrome”, whereby ecosystems are not natural representatives, and in this case already under the influence of commercial activities before historical records began. This is where the palaeontologists come in, with their longer-term but also older pre-human influence information. Unfortunately, someone called one of the palaeontologists fat*, and to date no attempts have been made to collaborate between fields and combine datasets into something that could be used to generate rigorous ecological baselines.

Until this happens, it will be impossible to pinpoint the reference conditions that oysters needed to thrive in the past, and how they will need to be managed in the future given further ecosystem disruptions. Such information could also tell us about how oyster abundances, distribution, and diversity has changed through time as a response to temperature, salinity, and sea-level rise, all factors which will vary to some degree with the continuation of global climatic disruptions.

So this is actually a pretty cool example of how things could work in the future. Historical data tells the intermittent and broken tale of how humans have impacted the oysters during the last 150 years or so, but not before this, and fossil and sedimentological data tells of longer-term trends before this time. The problem, as ever with historical data of this nature, is the resolution – there’s never enough data when and where you need it to tie in a complete picture of ecology through time, and with each piece that is missing, the picture on the puzzle box blurs a little more.

In the future, it looks like more collaboration is needed. This shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve, as scientists are social animals, right? Right?? But seriously, if geologists, ecologists, historians, archaeologists, and even those most blessed of scientists, the palaeontologists could sit down, and figure out a strategic way of pooling their data, expertise, and resources, the pictures of past trends would reveal themselves with increasing clarity, and we’d have our launch point for historical ecology, and conservation biology.

*I have no evidence to substantiate this, but assume it’s why no co-operation is happening.

Reference:

T. C. Rick and R. Lockwood (2013) Integrating Palaeobiology, Archaeology, [I added in the ‘a’s] and history to inform biological conservation, Conservation Biology, 27(1), 45-54

Jon began university life as a geologist, following this with a treacherous leap into the life sciences with a course in biodiversity and taxonomy. Now undertaking a PhD in tetrapod biodiversity and extinction at Imperial College London, there was a brief interlude were Jon was sucked into the world of science policy and communication. He blogs at http://blogs.egu.eu/palaeoblog/, tweets as Protohedgehog and co-runs an [infamous, probably] podcast series called Palaeocast. Jon can usually be found procrastinating in pubs, trying to exchange bad science, usually about dinosaurs, in exchange for food and beer.

Tell us a bit about you and your social media project

I’m currently a PhD student at Imperial College London, investigating the biodiversity patterns of tetrapods (anything with four limbs/wings/flippers) about 145 million years ago to see what we can figure out in a macroevolutionary sense, and whether we can find a ‘hidden’ mass extinction in the fossil record. I commit some of my time to 3 major social media platforms: blogging, tweeting, and podcasting, with a bit of Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and others on the side.  These activities are less of a project, per se, and more just stuff I do in parallel, and often with overlap, with my PhD research.

Why did you decide to start this project? 

The main reason that I initially got into social media, was because I was chronically unemployed after my second Masters. Delving into the world of tweeting and blogging seemed like a great way to develop my writing skills and online networking, alongside volunteer work at the University of Leicester. Some time after,Dave Marshall mentioned his idea for the Palaeocast podcast, and we launched things from there.

So to begin with, my aims were a little uncertain, but after some time (I’ve been involved with social media for almost 18 months now), I’ve begun to refine my activities in response to experiences, and the fact that I’ve recently started a PhD. I’ve narrowed the focus of my blog posts to covering recent scientific research as a way of making the science more accessible and improving the reach of new developments in the field of palaeontology. When I began my PhD, I also began to use the blog as a gateway for opening up the processes involved in my research. Twitter has proved invaluable for many reasons including disseminating my blog posts, developing contacts with those outside, as well as those within,  academia, and keeping up to date with scientific and science policy developments.

How did you get started and did you encounter any problems?

Getting started was actually pretty easy. To begin with, I used the WordPress platform for blogging, which is just a case of making a free account and figuring out which template you’d like to use. About 9 months after, the blog became part of the launch of European Geosciences Union blog network, and has been there ever since. This is managed externally so I don’t need to worry about any technical issues. It was also easy to get started with Twitter; finding networks to integrate into was just a case of being active and sending out a few exploratory tendrils. Podcasting was a little more complex, as we had to acquire equipment and build a website. We’re now also looking into setting up a dedicated server to host the material. To help us get started with the podcasting   we applied for education and outreach grants from relevant societies, and were fortunate enough to be successful with both The Palaeontological Society and Palaeontological Association. We added a third member, Joe Keating, to our team then, and have been palaeocasting ever since, with big plans for the future!

In terms of support, I actually had very little from friends, family or colleagues. In fact, it was mostly the online community which I primarily knew through Twitter (and subsequently in real life) which supported my development as a fledgling science communicator. Colleagues have warned me  to make sure my social media activities don’t detract time from my research, which is fine, as I’m technically paid to be a researcher. This means that I do commit additional time to these things, both inside and outside of work. Some fellow PhD students from within my department have very occasionally said they like my writing, but that’s about it in terms of support from within academia.

What were the outcomes of your project? Was it a success or were there also downsides? 

I’d like to think that my time committed to social media has been pretty successful. I now have many academic and non-academic contacts, many of whom I consider as friends after meeting them in real life. I have also greatly improved my writing skills (apparently), to the extent that I’ve been fortunate enough to write several guest posts, write for a European organisation, and am soon going to be part of two new science blog networks. Through all of this, I haven’t been paid a penny. It’s all volunteering, and I do it in my ‘spare’ time.

There are some financial benefits, such as a fully-funded trip to a conference in Vienna to discuss social media as an academic (where I’m writing this from!) In terms of results, it’s a blend of qualitative and quantitative outcomes. Anecdotally, I’ve had many great experiences with people and events that are outside of the ‘typical’ academic sphere, and am sure I will continue to do so. I think that my writing skills have vastly improved and I guess the only way I can hesitantly say this is from the comments that I get from readers. In terms of stats, visits to my  blog posts are substantially higher than when I first started (about four times as much, on average, with the usual Twitter boosts!). I now have over 2500 Twitter followers, and have just hit 10,000 episode downloads with Palaeocast, which I guess is an indication that some people are listening to, or at least interested in, what I have to say and the content I deliver. So, although I’m in this primarily to disseminate my research and research field, I do feel like my online profile is beginning to naturally develop in concert with this, which may lead to additional opportunities in the future.

How did you assess whether the project was a success and whether it achieved your original goals? 

Given that I didn’t really have any initial goals, I guess this meant that I initially lacked direction, but it has also meant that every reward, no matter how small, seems like a great success to me. This is anything from receiving positive comments on my blog posts, to achieving statistical milestones, such as the 10,000 downloads for Palaeocast. I think impact assessment is one of the most difficult things about these types of on-going social media activities. We can look at simple dissemination metrics which give an indication of the reach of article or podcast episodes, using tools such as ImpactStory or CrowdBooster, but for me the success comes from the comments and feedback I receive, in real life, on blog posts, and on Twitter. It’s these anecdotal experiences for me that make it all worthwhile. I’d like to think that Palaeocast is going from strength to strength too, and has most certainly achieved our initial target of delivering scientific content directly from scientists with great success, based on feedback we receive and on the increasing download statistics.

Did you unexpectedly achieve other things as well? E.g. Did you form unplanned collaborations?

Most of the effects of what I do have been largely unanticipated; being invited to talk about social media at events is always an unexpected email to receive, for example! The main thing, I guess, has probably been the welcoming nature of the social media community, both online and in real life, to both myself as a researcher and the things I produce. The whole experience has generally been pretty awesome because of this, and presumably will continue to be in future! One thing that I’m currently working on is a collaboration with two people involved with the more social aspects of science, who are interested informally assessing a scheme initiated by a learned society. Hopefully, we can reveal more about at this new project at some point in the future!

List your five top tips for anyone wanting to start a similar project

• Be brave. It’s a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no telling where you might be swept off to. Or something like that – you’ll never know where your social media journey will take you, but you certainly won’t without taking the initial plunge.
• Be adaptive and be flexible – social media changes, and your audience will too. So stay on theme, but don’t be too rigid.
• Don’t be afraid to ask people for tips and advice – the social media community is totally awesome, extremely friendly, and helpful.
• You will get better over time. Don’t expect to become Ed Yong or Carl Zimmer overnight. It takes at least 3 weeks to hit that kind of status.
• There is a danger that you might, be perceived  as ‘self-promoting’ by your peers or others. Let them have their opinions; as long as you are promoting your science, then passive self-promotion is a natural part of this.

Dinosaurs. What springs to mind when they’re mentioned? Colossal, towering sauropods? Packs of feisty feathered fiends? Or huge herds of hadrosaurs, chomping their way across the plains of long-lost worlds? Most, including myself, will automatically default to any one of these images when dinosaurs come up in conversation (what, you mean it’s not that frequent for normal people?) But we often neglect to think the earliest dinosaurs, spectacular organisms that gave birth to the most successful, and on-going, terrestrial vertebrate radiation of all time.

Dinosaurs arose about 232-225 million years ago (mya), during the Carnian-lowermost Norian stage of the Triassic, the first period of the Mesozoic era. Their remains are known from a latitudinal belt, at about 40-50 degrees South, in Argentina, Brazil, India, and Zimbabwe. The fossil record of these earliest dinosaurs is quite varied. In Argentina, many near-complete skeletons of species such as Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Eodromaeus, are known, and in Brazil, Saturnalia and Pampadromaeus are the two best known examples. The formations that these are from have been intensively sampled (hacked apart for fossils), as opposed to others, which is a contributing factor to how much we know, relatively, about their biological bounties.

Eoraptor lunensis, from the Ischigualasto Formation, NW Argentina (about 230 mya). Artwork by Emilio López-Rolandi. (Ezcurra, 2012)

Slightly younger beds are becoming increasingly well-sampled, especially around Europe, Argentina, the USA, and South Africa. These formations yield precursors to the well-known major sub-groups of dinosaurs, namely the basal sauropodomorphs and basal neotheropods. This shows us that the major divisions within dinosaurs were already recognisably established by the mid-late Norian of the Triassic (about 215 mya). How these dinosaurs changed on a large scale is of great interest to palaeontologists presently, as what could be more intriguing that understanding how dinosaurs came to be such a successful group?

The study of these broad scale patterns, including speciation, extinction, and the extrinsic environmental and intrinsic biological parameters that contribute to these patterns is called ‘macroevolution’. For palaeontologists, this is becoming a really cool subject to get stuck into, as it allows us to see how certain groups of organisms respond to things such as climate change, and therefore is quite applicable to modern day and near-future issues.

Cool restoration of a Triassic ecosystem, where dinosaurs were only just starting out (Source)

Bringing this back to the idea of the earliest dinosaurs, the idea that we can gain insight into how groups of organisms flourished to become dominant through looking at macroevolutionary patterns is pretty neat! Obviously, early dinosaurs aren’t around today. But by analysing them, we can fill in another part of the puzzle as to how and why groups of organisms fluctuate in diversity through time, replacing, succeeding and dominating each other in the dance of life.

Martin Ezcurra is currently a PhD student in Munich working on the early systematics of a group called Archosauriformes. His 25th paper to date (no pressure then) reviewed the taxonomy and palaeobiogeography of these earliest dinosaurs in a macroevolutionary context. He found that in Argentina and Brazil, there are 10 or 11 recognisable species in late Carnian to early Norian deposits, a huge leap from what we knew just a decade ago. Back in the Triassic, these areas formed part of south-western Pangaea, so it is odd that, by contrast, only one or two species can be identified from deposits from the same time, but from south-central Pangaea (now Zimbabwe and India). Ezcurra thinks this may be down to the less intensive sampling of dinosaur-bearing formations in these countries; so Zimbabwe and India, you know what to do!

Paleobiogeographical distribution of the oldest known dinosaur assemblages (Ezcurra, 2012)

To understand these patterns are controlled, it is necessary to look at other sources of information that can be integrated into macroevolutionary studies. This includes palaeoclimatic data, such as temperature, humidity, atmospheric chemistry, as well as parameters such as altitude and land surface area. The regions where these dinosaurs are found are interpreted to have once been subtropical to cool temperate arid areas. Humidity is actually thought to have been an important driver of these early dinosaurian biogeography patterns, with dinosaurs achieving a cosmopolitan distribution by the latest Triassic. This may be linked to a period of global climate change, such as the end of the “Carnian Pluvial Event”.

Intriguingly, no dinosaur remains are known from contemporary formations closer to the equator. In the humid tropical to warm temperate areas of Laurasia (0-30 degrees North), the only known tetrapod fossils are ‘non-dinosaur dinosauriforms’ (palaeontologists know how to make their jobs easier) such as Silesaurus opolensis, Saltopus elginensis, and Diodorus scytobrachion. This dichotomous taxonomic distribution may indicate that climatic variables were largely responsible for the early, but isolated, evolution and diversification of dinosaurs. Note, that if this is the case, as already has been suggested for many other groups, it shows that climate changes don’t always inflict extinction extinction extinction upon organisms, as I think many today seem to believe with the concurrent ‘biodiversity crisis’ and global warming. In fact, a recent paper has demonstrated that tropical species, specifically ectotherms, may in fact benefit from a warming climate by conferring the advantaged of higher maximal development rate. Integrating studies such as this with that of Ezcurra are crucial if we are to gain a sort of reciprocal illumination, of how life got to the stage it’s at, and the biological or environmental conditions responsible for that.

References:

Ezcurra, M. D. (2012) Comments on the taxonomic diversity and palaeobiogeography of the earliest known dinosaur assemblages (Late Carnian-Earliest Norian)), Historia Natural, 2(1), 49-71

Walters, R. J., Blanckenhorn, W. U. and Berger, D. (2012) Forecasting extinction risk of ectotherms under climate warming: an evolutionary perspective, Functional Ecology, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2012.02045.x 

In the UK, many if not most Master’s students do not publish their postgraduate research. I’ve been informed by several people that in US-based institutions, Master’s students are continuously encouraged to publish their material by their supervisors and institutions.

Two years ago, I undertook an MSc at the Natural History Museum in London. One of the requirements, as with most postgraduate courses, was to undertake a research-based thesis. Out of the 21 students, so far only a single person (Roland Sookias) has had their research published. I have been informed that from at least the previous two years, this is pretty much the normal rate of publication! In fact, during the entire year I studied there, not a single supervisor/lecturer even mentioned formal publication or how to even approach manuscript preparation. This is an essential skill that all students should be taught really, and at least in my academic experience has been mysteriously neglected, by both students and their respective supervisors and lecturers it seems. This is especially the case, I feel, for Master’s students who wish to progress in academia, particularly through PhD research. Papers are academic currency, and the sooner you start accumulating wealth, the better.

Publication of Master’s research, anecdotally, seems more often to be the exception and not the rule. When it comes down to it, there are 5 options really that students have with respect to publication:

1. They simply choose not to
2. Their work is not sufficient for publication
3. They attempted to publish, and failed (rejected after submission)
4. They published formally in a peer-reviewed journal
5. [This is the new one] They can make the manuscript and data available through other methods

I’m currently re-writing my own thesis (second Master’s) into a manuscript that is acceptable for publication, with guidance from my supervisor, Norm MacLeod. Admittedly, at the time of submission, the research was probably somewhere around option 2 – I’ve since done some additional analyses and found some cool stuff. This should be submitted to PLoS One shortly. This has taken some extra time, alongside my PhD, but to get a peer-reviewed publication out of it, it’s worth doing I think as an early career researcher (and I’m sure many others would agree).

The NHM in London is a world-class research institution, and all research conducted here should be published in some form, regardless of the academic level of the person conducting it. To shrug off this responsibility is detrimental to science. This is especially so if destructive processes are involved (e.g., DNA extraction and sequencing in invertebrates), as this research can never be replicated again.

Disclaimer: Attempts to reformat your thesis may lead to an annihilation of the soul.

There are alternatives to peer-reviewed publication. For this process, you have to go through many steps such as manuscript reformatting, peer review and possible rejection. Instead of this long-winded, and often extremely time-consuming process, you can submit your data and thesis, as it is, to open online archives. The only time this takes is that required to make an account (free), and upload the research, in raw formats (in most cases). For example, I recently uploaded my first Masters thesis, and accompanying data to FigShare, and the manuscript again to Arxiv to increase the visibility of the research. Since uploading to FigShare, both items have had over 600 views together, which is substantially more than it would have sitting on my hard-drive as a pdf, and I’m not sure about arxiv as they don’t have any metrics like that. This has made the research open and available, and if someone wants to use it, they can freely, with the one caveat that they’ll have to review the value and quality of it. Any scientist who think this is a negative step under-values themselves and the role of peer-review.

For a PhD, it usually helps to have publication experience, the best opportunity of which is with your Master’s thesis. On the other hand. if you’re not planning on going into further education after course completion, why should you publish? Well, you don’t have to follow the ‘traditional route’ – the above is a time-easy alternative, and is a sure way of making your research open and accessible. Supervisors can provide additional advice on this, I’m sure.

So Master’s-level research appears, to me, a severely under-tapped source of scientific research in the UK. This is not just in terms of results and conclusions drawn, but also the literature critiques that accompany them, potential new methodologies, and the original re-usable data. Publication promotes an individual’s academic growth, and credibility as an author. I’d imagine that employers outside of academia would look upon this well too. Despite potentially being a difficult and time-consuming task, preparing and submitting a manuscript can be emotionally satisfying, and give a student a great sense of accomplishment and a confidence boost. If, however, you don’t want to pursue this route, you still have a duty to make your research accessible, and now with tools like FigShare and Arxiv, that take just minutes instead of weeks or months to publish with, there’s really no excuse any more. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the fruits of so much labour from young scientists was made free for people to read and use, instead of being archived into dusty institutional shelves.

Post note: Carl Boettiger made a similar call recently too, which I was only made aware of after publishing this post: http://haldanessieve.org/2013/01/14/consider-public-archiving-for-your-dissertation/

You can tell a lot about the leopard seal’s diet from its dentition. The presence of heterogeneous teeth is often an indicator of generalist or opportunist feeding strategies, as specific dentition is suitable for handling particular prey types. We know that leopard seals are not generalists, but something of polarised specialists, with incisors specialised to capture large mammalian (and other large) prey and forked cheek (post canine) teeth for sieving out small prey (krill). Crabeater seals have the same adaptation and despite their names, the vast majority of their diet is comprised of krill. 

Lower jaw of a leopard seal, Hydrurga leptonyx, – you can see the forked (‘sieve’) teeth on the left, and sharp (raptorial) incisors on the right.

The forked cheek teeth of a crabeater seal, Lobodon carcinophaga, (the 3rd from the left has been partially damaged)

In order to better understand their feeding strategies, Dr. David Hocking monitored the feeding habits of a pair of captive leopard seals when given small prey (chopped fish). The leopard seals made a raised head-strike towards their prey before sucking it into their mouth. Hocking hypothesised that this might let them feed more effectively on small schooling prey, such as krill and when testing this observed – for the first time ever – that leopard seals sieve their prey. After sucking their meal into their mouth, a leopard seal parts its lips and expels seawater at the back of the jaw (where the cheek teeth are located), sending turbulent jets of seawater through their dental sieve and retaining the prey inside.

What’s more, the lack of abrasion on their cheek teeth shows that these aren’t used for aggressive feeding (which would result in greater wear). Likewise, the heavy abrasion on their incisors corresponds to raptorial feeding. Captive crabeater seals have also been seen to suck prey out of a channel half a metre long, an ability that may help them acquire over-wintering krill from crevices (during the winter months krill are less prevalent in the water column and take shelter in crevices within ice floes).

So how do they force out the seawater? There is the possibility that they use their tongue to hold the prey in place as they expel seawater, but if this were the case there would be nothing to force the water out. Instead, Hocking suggests they push the seawater out through forked teeth (an excellent strainer) using their tongue.

Wooosh! Out goes the water!

While it’s difficult to extrapolate the findings from a pair of seals to an entire species, these results are a promising venture into understanding the feeding ecology of leopard seals.

Reference:

Hocking DP, Evans AR and Fitzgerald EM (2013) Leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) use suction and filter feeding when hunting small prey underwater. Polar Biology, Vol. 36, pp. 211-222. 

At this years European Geosciences Union General Meeting (Vienna), I’ve been asked to be on a panel discussion describing the ways in which I think using social media and blogging can enhance academic careers. Sometimes, talks of this kind can be very echo-chambery, and there are plenty of really cool guides already out there online. This was a chance though to actually directly target a group of academics who may not have any experience of these things though, so was an opportunity to mobilise a new wave of ‘web 2.0′-active academics. Of course, I’m writing this in advance of the actual discussion, so it might be the case that only a few people turn up and live-blog the entire thing, in which case it might be viewed as a little preaching-to-the-convertedy.

Here’s a rough transcript of what I said for my part of the discussion:

Right off the bat, I want to emphasise that using social media tools and writing blog posts are not for everyone. There is no ‘magic bullet’ pathway that is suddenly going to transform your career, and you won’t become some sort of maestro overnight: this stuff takes time, energy, and thought to commit to effectively. Time is the largest caveat: scientists work ridiculously long hours already; I personally work every day from about 10am until 12-4am, unless I’m off at a networking or learning event in London (or a conference), or decide to actually have a social life outside of the academic sphere. Not everyone can or wants to work hours like these, they might have families or other things to commit their time to, and many may not want to add these things to their extensive lists of things to do. People who say that ALL scientists need to become better communicators by embracing social media and blogging are blind to the pressures that we already face in terms of time commitment, and must realise that there is currently no formal reward system in place for us to embrace these things. Additionally, each person’s experience will be unique depending on their approach, so there is no general guide to success or even precisely what to do. It all depends on how much time you’re prepared to commit to these things, and the networks into which you find yourself integrated.

Source.

So, in spite of these first initial points of concern, the aspects of your academic career that using social media and writing blog posts can open up can be incredibly beneficial on three levels: personally, career-wise, and field-wide. I’ll address these sporadically below.

It seems to me, as a very early career researcher, that the realm of science and scholarly communication is changing. Scientists are beginning to embrace, to a degree, the use and value of social media, blogging, and public outreach and engagement as part of an adoption of a culture of scientific openness. In part, I think this can relate to the ‘Brian Cox Effect’, where, the broader public are becoming more interested in scientific advancements. I think that this actually goes beyond just blogging and social media then; it’s about the emergence of a new ‘model’ of scientist, where everything that we do is geared towards the question of ‘how can we take the science beyond the science’. There are 5 main traits that I think identify this model:

1. Academics are both aware and active with respect to current policy issues (e.g., science funding, open access, relative discipline-related policies such as marine science in the UK);

2. Commitment to direct public outreach, through science events, public seminars, skeptics in the pub etc.;

3. Indirect science communication, such as blogging, social media use (e.g., Twitter), science podcasting, television appearances – mostly related to the advancements of web technologies;

4. Open science advocation – taking your science out of the lab, not just by publishing in open access journals and using open data platforms like FigShare, but making the knowledge and the methods of knowledge acquisition accessible through ‘open notebook’ style transparency;

5. All the time, thinking about reciprocal engagement that you can only get through this sort of transparency; what can your science and your field do beyond simply getting published?

   

   Source.

So here are some examples of how I’ve used this social media, blogging, and an adoption of this model personally:

• The Science Online (SpotOn) conference last year, I was invited to co-host two sessions about how academics and policymakers can enhance their reciprocal engagement to improve the strength of science-informed policies;

• I co-run a podcast series called Palaeocast, which just hit the benchmark of 10,000 downloads in just 6 months. Palaeocast is all about removing barriers between scientists and the broader public (i.e., by bypassing the lexicon of science-speak in journals), and we’ve found is a great way of conveying palaeontological research;

• The many uses of Twitter:

  • As an amplification tool for research, blog articles, Palaeocast, other interesting items

  • An incredibly up-to-date news reel

  • Discussion and networking platform (indirectly and directly, through scitweetups) – I’ve actually got many good friends now who I met primarily through Twitter

  • As a mode of science communication, by opening up what scientists actually do, and demonstrating that they are willing to discuss their research more broadly and openly

• Blogging has many uses too:

  • It opens up the process and outputs of my own, and others, scientific research

  • It makes research more accessible, by communicating it in a more informative and jargon-free (not the same as ‘dumbing down’) manner than journal articles

    • Have to be careful sometimes, as obviously blogs don’t have the ‘stamp of approval’ that peer -reviewed articles have. That’s why I think scientists make the best writers, as we know the field better, naturally, and are more adept at extracting and critiquing information within articles (it’s our job to)

  • It helps to build your online footprint

  • You can get feedback on your research from scientists within the field, and those outside too (e.g., copy-editors)

Throughout all this, it’s obvious that one medal certainly does not fit all. Everyone will have different experiences depending on what they’ve committed to, which networks they’ve developed, and who they’ve reached with their outputs. It’s worth emphasising that adaptation and flexibility are key, as social media develop, as science progresses, and due to the natural variation of audiences. But, you won’t know what the benefits of all of these are unless you actually go out there and try it, and stick with it. I can’t tell you how blogging, tweeting, or podcasting will enhance your career, your scientific development, or the outputs of your field of science – this is something you’ll only be able to tell after giving it a shot and looking back on changes after some time.

Source.

This brings us on to the issue of ‘impact’ – how do you know that your efforts of transparency, openness, outreach and engagement have actually had an effect? On a personal level, this is easy to see – check your writing, and see how much it has changed in style over time. The transformation can be quite impressive some times! But in terms of more broader impact, this is more difficult to measure. We’re in the early stages of quantitative measurement of research outputs – we all know that impact factors are a poor method of personal assessment, but we have tools now like altmetrics and ImpactStory that show the broader dissemination of research (blog posts, journal articles). But these still don’t measure ‘true impact’ – research impact isn’t citation counts, number of tweets, being picked up by a research outlet, it’s not even about being published in Nature; it’s about the things you can’t always measure. Comments and feedback you get, such as about initiating a societal or cultural change, or personal development or thought, are what really matters. You won’t always know about this, and dissemination metrics can only ever give you an informed guess about the potential volume of impact. For example, someone mailing you to say thanks for writing about your PhD and that it’s made them decide to pursue one now too after knowing a bit more about how they work, is worth more to me than a million blog post hits and no comments. It’s for these anecdotal comments why I do what I do – even if you can’t always put a number on things, it’s nice to know that what you’re doing is making a difference.

Now would probably be a good time to plug a recent article by a friend [the link to which is posted on Twitter, right abooout, now]. Jane Robb is a geologist and science communicator, and recently published a call for geologists to increase their public engagement activities, as a community. This occurs in two steps: firstly, within academia, in terms of wider education about the societal, cultural and economic implications of geoscientific research, which in turn would hopefully translate to more effective communication outside of academia, through the methods mentioned, and a broader appreciation and understanding of the effects of our research. This could help prevent issues influenced by the lack of understanding of our research, such as through the L’Aquila verdict where scientific evidence about earthquakes was effectively ignored and the concept of scientific uncertainty completely misconstrued, and more recently where Iain Duncan Smith made the ludicrous statement that geologists where of relatively less value than shelf-stackers, both of which point to a systemic communications issue between academia, and the end users of our research.

 So, to summarise:

• Social media, blogging, etc., are all good for the discipline in terms of increased public understanding of what it is we do as a research community, and facilitates two-way communication between science, the general public, and policy spheres;

• Allows the general public to become reciprocally involved and engaged with the discipline (it is their money we’re spending after all much of the time, so why shouldn’t they get a say in how we progress?);

• Blogging is superb for improving your writing skills, and learning to write for different audiences (and getting invited to conferences in Vienna);

• Can help to inspire the next generation of scientists;

• It’s a step towards embracing a culture of openness in science;

• It increases your professional and public profile, naturally, which is great for job prospects, potential future collaborations, further promoting your research, and other opportunities.

That’s about it. Should hopefully have been about 10 minutes! If there’s more revealed during the discussion after this, I’ll write it up in a new article, and of course, feedback on the content here is greatly appreciated!

Welcome to Day 3 of the EGU Annual Meeting. Do check the Geology for Global Development page too for some cracking updates on the sessions, particularly on the more ‘applied’ side of the geosciences, by Rosalie Testovin. This post is a quick break-down of some cool science from the morning session on the interaction between tectonics (faulting and folding from plate-related movements) and stratigraphy (the way in which rock packages are linked with each other). Naturally, I had to cover this one, as it was co-sponsored by the Geological Society of London (I’m an ex-employee), and was convened by a member of my department (Dr. Alex Whittaker) at Imperial College with another giving a talk (Prof. Phillip Allen). Here’s a quick break down of some of the talks (at least in as much detail as to be expected from a vertebrate palaeontologist):

Using thermochronology (dating events in rocks using isotopic ratios), combined with old-school optical techniques, it was possible to discern the origin and timing of origin of the sands in the Saudi Arabian desert.

Warning.

Salt can flow, and transport sediments on top great distances (e.g., in the Gulf of Mexico). They also are relatively weak aspects of bedrock, so are preferentially deformed in sedimentary basins. You can see this using 3D ground-penetrating imaging techniques, where the surface representation of the deformation is revealed by depressions, domes from extrusions as the salt is squeezed upwards, and shear zones (fault zones, which accommodate the stress of moving salt), the direction of which is largely dependent on the position of the shelf edge and the direction of salt flow.

The eastern-Alpine mountains are a pretty geologically-complex area. New information from sediments in the region tell us about the sediment budget of the initial mountain ranges, the erosion rates, and where the sediments in the associated basins comes from (mountain ranges typically have associated sedimentary basins where the deposited sediments (molasse) are in some way related to the ‘unroofing’ of the mountains (erosion) or form due to topographic variations (e.g., see the basin and range province of SE Spain). An unconformity (stratigraphic hiatus in the rock sequence) in the foreland Alpine basin between the Quaternary and Miocene periods is indicative of a shift in the rate of erosion in the Alps. One interpretation of this is tectonically-driven uplift of the Alps, and the exclusion of climate change as a controlling parameter, which would have resulted in very different erosion rates.

Phillip Allen discussed a ‘source-to-sink’ model from the Eocene period of the Pyrenees, by looking at sediment routing systems resulting  from the way faults within basins affect the topography (geomorphology). What this can give you is an understanding of the total volume of sediment supply, and the change in sediment types and grain sizes, which are a function of the way in which the sediments have been transported from their mountain. This sediment routing system appears to not have been affected by climatic variations, which would give a distinctive sedimentary profile by altering the sediment supply.

And you thought cows had nothing to do with geology.. (click for larger)

Unfortunately, I missed the last session by Brian Romans as firstly, there was a press conference on ‘reversing climate change?’, and also needed a coffee. (priorities)

Day 2 in the Big Brother house (aka the European Geosciences Union General Meeting). There’s no where near enough beer, and tensions are getting high. A horde of angry horses have invaded the lower levels, and taken the President of Austria hostage, with demands of lowering the Fair Straw Tax.

But throughout all the acid-fuelled hysteria, two events have stuck out so far today. The first was a workshop discussion on open access publishing for early career researchers (ECRs), hosted by a new Editor for the EGU’s publishing house, Copernicus. Unfortunately, this event confirmed a lot of the current issues with the development of open access policies globally, in that there has been a serious communications breakdown about the effects the policy transitions, particularly in the UK now that Research Councils UK’s (RCUK) open access policy has come into play (April 1st), will have on how and where ECRs can publish. Here are comments on several of the more prevalent points raised:

The misconception that Gold-route open access publishing requires you to pay, up front, an Article Processing Charge (APC). Gold open access is immediate open access publishing, under an appropriate license (CC-BY, according to the RCUK) – of all global open access journals, the APC median and mode is zero. The commercial publishers, who don’t have institutional backing, and largely out-dated models of publication, still charge exorbitant prices (up to $5000 in cases), as they are established names, with a track record of successful publishing. They also happen to operate many of the middle-tier ranked journals, based on impact factors (a journal-based metric that measures the average citations of the journal’s articles over two years), which makes them attractive to scientists in terms of where to publish.

This is a prominent issue at the moment within academia. How do you avoid falling into the trap that journal title and impact factor mean anything about the quality of your research, and at the same time reach the audience who you want to (i.e., those in your field who read those journals). My response to this is that if you can’t reach the people who you want without having to submit to a particular journal, you’re not trying hard enough and under-estimate alternative non-subject specific methods of dissemination. Conferences and direct emails are a great way of distributing your research to the right audiences, as well as hosting them on your department or research group or personal website. RSS feeds of non-subject specific journals make discoverability a piece of cake nowadays. Using a combination of these methods, I don’t see any reason why your research can’t hit your intended audience.

With respect to impact factor as a mode of quality assessment on an individual basis, I’m just gonna leave this here: http://occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2012/08/13/sick-of-impact-factors/. Along with this, it means that there’s no longer any excuse to conform to relevant policies and publish open access. Dissemination of research has never been easier in this digital age, and we have to kick the impact factor habit (RCUK has explicitly stated that IF won’t be used as an assessment metric). Alternatives such as ImpactStory and AltMetric are tools that are a step on the right path towards diving ‘true impact’ of research by providing more details about how the research has been picked up and distributed.

Other things to consider with respect to cost are models like PeerJ, a new initiative where you can have a personal and unlimited publishing account, with open peer review, for $299; BioMed Central, PLoS and others offer fee waivers for anyone who can’t afford APCs (PLoS have never rejected a fee waiver, to my knowledge); developing countries have special circumstances recognised by many publishers that make research freely available to them anyway (see PNAS and Nature Publishing Group), and, er, a lot more stuff that I can go into more detail after the ‘Demystifying Open Access’ session on Thursday evening here, which I’ll be part of as an ECR with knowledge of open access (caveat: I’ve never been published in a peer-reviewed journal, yet).

So yeah, lots of discussion about open access that indicates, to me, that people who are OA advocates, who work on the policy front-line, and those who are generally involved in the discussion must work harder to communicate the changes and issues with those who the policy changes will have the greatest impact on. So on from impacts of publishing to impacts of an entirely new kind!

In case you’ve been living in a hole for the last few weeks, a 10,000 tonne, 17m wide meteor slammed into Russia on February 15th, injuring more than 1000 people, and making a pretty loud bang, and spanking the Earth with the power of nearly 1000 Hiroshima bombs (about 400 kila-tonnes). On the same day, another meteor struck completely unrelated to this one at Chelyabinsk, but the difference being that it wasn’t a surprise, caught on a video of the dashboard of some lucky driver, but had been monitored for over a year, giving somewhat more of a warning than a few seconds.

Bulk fragment of the Cherbarkul meteorite (Credit: C. Mayer / F. Jourdan; Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, Curtin University)

Known as the ‘Russian Fireball’, which also happens to have been Lenin’s bedroom name, the geochemistry of this extra-terrestrial rock star has began to be unravelled. Analysis of albite (one end-member mineral of plagioclase feldspar, which has a sodium-calcium solid solution) reveals to us the age and formation of the rock, as well as the impact history and secondary processes that occurred within the asteroid. Pretty neat eh, I guess chemistry does have it’s uses. Slightly cooler though, is what the science team had been doing to develop their understanding of how impact craters develop, by creating experimental impact craters in the lab and comparing the crater morphology to learn about speed, angle of impact, density, effect of substrate, and how to make large holes in your boss’ wall.

Close up on the interior of a fragment of the Cherbarkul meteorite (Credit: C. Mayer / F. Jourdan; Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, Curtin University) (click for larger)

An International Monitoring System acquires data about sound activity from around the Earth. Although not explicitly geared towards detecting atmosphere-penetrating projectiles, the system does detect anomalous sound sources, such as from accidental explosions (*glances at North Korea*), meteorite entries, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, severe storms, and the coming of Cthulhu. On this occasion, the impact was heard from more than 20 infrasound monitoring stations from around the globe; not particularly useful as a warning system, but still pretty cool. These stations can also be used to estimate the energy release from impacts.

Close up on the fusion crust surrounding a fragment of the Cherbarkul meteorite (Credit: C. Mayer / F. Jourdan; Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, Curtin University) (click for larger)

To finish, and a rather controversial point, when asked if we needed to invest more in developing early-warning and detection systems for near-Earth objects, one of the panellists, Alexander Deutsch (University of Munster, Germany), remarked that we don’t, as we already have sufficient data to monitor all dangerously-sized projectiles. Apart from the Russian Fireball, apparently. Do we need to invest more in a global monitoring system?

Close up on the melt rock found within a fragment of the Cherbarkul meteorite (Credit: C. Mayer / F. Jourdan; Western Australian Argon Isotope Facility, Curtin University) (click for larger)

NASA might be having a rain-check on its outreach activities, but that’s not why Curiosity has gone silent the last few days. Every once in a while an event known as the Mars Solar Conjunction places Mars’ orbit directly behind the sun with respect to Earth, and makes communications impossible. Transmissions have ceased until May 1st, when the red planet will pop back into digital sight. Until then, Curiosity is working on the ‘B-side’ (like the cool side of the pillow) of its systems and operating autonomously.

In the mean time, I’ve been fortunate enough to be at the MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) Press Conference here in Vienna, with the latest from the little (1 tonne) science-savvy robot. During the current down time, it’s a chance for the teams to begin to really process the data and get the science out there (see here for where Curiosity has got to so far). This is a snippet of what to expect in forthcoming publications.

Panel at the Press Conference: (from left to right) John Grotzinger, Sylvestre Maurice, Sushil Atreya, Javier Gomez-Elvira, and Igor Mitrofanov (click for larger)

Curiosity is equipped with a lethal plethora of analytical weaponry, from the ChemCam chemical analyser, to the RAD radiation sensors. The ChemCam operates by firing laser bursts at samples of either dust or rock, and analysing the plasma released from the superheated materials (plasma is a partially-ionised gas that gives off a diagnostic spectra pattern depending on the bulk geochemistry of what you’re analysing). To date, Curiosity has been trigger-happy enough to fire off around 40,000 shots at various inanimate targets (no Martians) to sniff their fumes and determine their chemistry. These laser shots actually have a secondary function too, and that’s to blast away the perpetual dust covering the rocks, like some sort of Martian maid shockwave-service.

GCMS, or gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, is a way of identifying the substance chemistry in samples and the relative proportions of those substances. It detects the atomic mass of samples that have been vaporised (there’s a liquid version too called LC-MS) and can measure the relative concentrations. The latest GCMS analysis done by Curiosity on clay samples detected water, perchlorates, carbonates, and both oxidised and reduced sulphur phases, which all point towards the presence at some point of a free-fluid phase. This is important, not because it shows evidence of life, but because it shows that the habitable conditions for certain types of organic life were once present on Mars. The origin of the carbon in these samples is still a bit of a mystery, according to Atreya.

Pew pew! (source)

SAM (Sample Analysis on Mars, which the GCMS is part of along with a quadrupole mass spectrometer and a tunable laser spectrometer) on a different sample aimed to measure the relative isotopic ratios in Martian argon (they have a heavier and a lighter version). The relative depletion of lighter argon isotopes, relative to the primordial level (raw, unmixed gas concentrations, determined from analyses of the sun and Jupiter), indicates that throughout geological time, Mars has actually lost quite a bit of its early atmosphere, as the lighter isotopes have not been constrained by gravity and simply floated off. Sushil Atreya (SAM co-investigator) said “We found arguably the clearest and most robust signature of atmospheric loss on Mars”. Other analyses all told a similar story, as carbon and oxygen isotopes were all enriched in heavier isotopes too. In all, estimates indicate that 85-90% of the original argon are gone. (what?).

The DAN (Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons) analysis, where albedo is sort of like the reflective ability of particles, showed that neutrons of hydrogen atoms (either molecular in water, or as a hydroxyl phase) changed state in a way that allows you tell the dose of radiation from emission. In a dual role, the analysis also allows you to measure the hydrogen content of any subsurface water particles. The DAN analysis from multiple locations seems to indicate a trend of increasing water content with depth (water can be intra-particulate in a structurally bound state, as well as in a free fluid phase or gas).

We got an additional update on the environmental conditions since day 1, as apparently Curiosity is a robotic weather machine too (the REMS, Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, equipment). Since ‘landing’, there was a steady increase in atmospheric pressure, which is now evening out, and at around 120 sol days in, there was a sudden ground temperature change (contraction of about 20 degrees), representing a change in rock type and accompanying heat capacity. This didn’t do much for comfort though, as the temperature still could plumet to as low as -80 degrees. Chilly

The next steps will be to test enrichment levels of methane within the groundrock, which will provide evidence for the evolution and state of organic compounds. Slightly more interesting than the state of hydrogen, but not as cool as finding a Velociraptor there. (although see this article).

Soon.. (source)

More stuff I wrote on Curiosity for the Geological Society of London: http://blog.geolsoc.org.uk/2012/08/30/if-a-rover-breaks-down-on-another-planet-does-anyone-hear-it/

Coverage by Jonathan Amos for the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22063337