News 2009
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Resources | Paul Barrett | BBSRC skull mechanics project |
| Arnau Bolet | Marc Jones | Ryoko Matsumoto | David Whiteside | Jérémy Anquetin |
Marianne
Pearson |
December 2009
Susan Evans contributes towards five papers
in a special publication of Palaeonotlogica Polonica
that
represents ten year's worth of research on the globally important Early
Triassic
vertebrate assemblage from Czatkowice, Poland.
December 2009
Ryoko Matsumoto attends the 11th Young Systematics Forum at
the Natural
History Museum where she was awarded the first place poster
prize.
December 2009
The lab is visited by Ingmar Werneburg (Paläontologisches
Institut und Museum).
November
2009
The lab is visited by Christy Anna Hipsley (Museum fuer Naturkunde
der Humboldt
Universitaet zu Berlin) who was examining lacertid lizard
material.
November
2009
Paul Barrett provided a quote for BBC news
website
regarding a new dinosaur from South Africa.
November
2009
Jérémy Anquetin successfully defended his PhD thesis on a
Middle Jurassic turtle from Scotland the systematics of early turtles.
October
2009
Marc Jones visited California to work with Kris
Lappin
(Caltech
Poly
Pomona) on lizard bite force funded by a UCL Bogue
Scholarship. He also visited collections
at the Natural History Museum of Los
Angeles
County hosted by Luis Chiappe. A photo taken near Pomona:
September
2009
The lab is visited by Pavel Skutchas (St Petersburg
University) visited the lab.
September
2009
Susan Evans, Paul Barrett, Marc Jones, David Whiteside and
Ryoko Matsumoto all attended the 69th Symposium of Vertebrate
Paleontology held
in Bristol.
September 2009
Susan Evans, Marc Jones and Ryoko Matsumoto
all presented talks at the 10th meeting on Mesozoic Terrestrial
Ecosystems and
Biota in Teruel Spain. Ryoko won the talk prize for her research
presentation on
choristoderes and freshwater assemblages.
September 2009
Following on from his involvement with Darwin
Now, Marc Jones
provided answers to questions relating to natural selection for Discover
news 163.com.
September 2009
Susan Evans provides an interview for Korean
television in the Grant Museum of Zoology about Darwin and Natural
Selection.
September 2009
The first ever bite force
measurements
obtained from adult tuatara (Sphenodon) were published in Journal
of the Royal Society of New Zealand in a paper authored by Marc
Jones and Kris Lappin of
California State
Polytechnic University. This work was identified as a "research
highlight" by the Royal
Society of New Zealand Journal
Watch webpage and was featured in Sciblogs.
September 2009
In conjuction with colleagues at University of Hull and Hull-York Medical
School Marc Jones
and Susan Evans published a paper in the journal Palaeontologia
Electonica about the head and neck anatomy in Sphenodon (the
New
Zealand tuatara) associated with feeding.
September 2009
Paul
Barrett contributed to a paper about the functional anatomy of
dromaeosaurid
theropod claws was published in a special edition of the Anatomical
Record on the palaeobiology of dinosaurs.
August 2009
Following invitation, Marc Jones presented a
talk at the conference "Is there life after a PhD" held at Cumberland Lodge. Photo
taken by Lauren Arrington.
July 2009
Marc Jones visits Yuan Wang at IVVP in
Beijing.
July 2009
After invitation, Marc Jones
participated in
the Darwin
Now
events held at the Science and Technology Museum in Xi’an, China. This
was part
of a global initiative, funded by the British Council, to
explore the
impact of Charles Darwin's legacy 200 years after his birth.It involved providing two
lectures about his research and running three workshops for school
children
about natural selection.
July 2009
An article about Beelzebufo
appears in regional issues of National Geographic.
July
2009
Emma Humphries and Neil Brocklehurst join the lab for the
summer.
June
2009
Paul Barrett contributed to a paper in the Proceedings
of the
National Academy of Sciences about jaw mechanics and feeding in
dinosaurs.
June
2009
Susan Evans, Marc Jones, and Ryoko Matsumoto attend the
first
ever meeting of the London Area Development and Evolution Network (LADEN) at
the Gordon
Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy (Kings College, University of
London).
May
2009
Work by Paul Barrett was featured in New
Scientist in an article about CT scanning fossil animals.
May
2009
Paul Barrett provided a quote for BBC News
Website
regarding long-neck dinosaurs.
May
2009
Work by
Marc Jones, Susan Evans and colleagues at University of Hull and Hull-York Medical School
on a
state-of-the-art computer model of a Sphenodon skull was
published in
Interface.
The model was based on data from high resolution computer tomography scans of skeletal elements and anatomical dissections of museum specimens.
When the computer model is directed to “bite” the activity of various muscle groups is determined by the spatial orientation of the muscles. Comparisons between the computer generated muscle activity and electromyographic data by Gorniak and co-workers from live tuatara in the early 1980s demonstrate tThis work was funded by the BBSRC and is part of a larger project investigating reptile skull mechanics.hat the computer based method of representing muscle activity is valid.
May
2009
Susan
Evans contributed to a paper contrubuted to a paper in PNAS
led by Mehran Moazen (University of Hull) about a Finite Element
computer model
of the skull of Uromastyx hardwickii modified to possess a
complete
lower temporal bar.
April
2009
Paul
Barrett published a first author paper in Proceedings
of the Royal Society B with Alistair McGowan and Victoria Page about
dinosaur diversity and the rock record.
April
2009
Marc
Jones takes part in NESTA Fame Lab with a talk
about the science of sleep.
March
2009
Marc
Jones was selected to participate in 'Evolutionary Biology: Evolution
150', a
workshop covering evolutionary biology to mark the 150th anniversary of
the
publication of “On the origin of species”. It was held in the ancient
city of
Cuenca (Spain) and co-funded by the British Council and
Spanish
Council for Scientific Research (CSIC).
March
2009
Talitha
Pires joins the lab for a few months.
March
2009
Susan
Evans published a paper with Jin-You Mo (Natural History Museum of
Guangxi) and
Xing Xu (IVPP) about a fossil lizard with a lower temporal bar in Proceedings
of the Royal Society B.
February
2009
Paul Barrett published a paper about the iguanodontoid
ornithopod with colleagues from the Natural History Museum and IVPP in
the
journal Acta
Palaeontologica Polonica.
February
2009
Susan Evans published a paper with Yuan Wang of IVPP about a
long-limbed lizard from Daohugou, China in the journal Vertebrata
PalAsiatica.
February
2009
Susan Evans provided talks for the Natural Sciences dining
club
and Craniofacial research group at King's College London.
January
2009
Marc Jones and Susan Evans published a paper in Proceedings
of the Royal Society B with other authors including Alan Tennyson
(Te Papa),
Jennifer Worthy (University of Adelaide), and Trevor Worthy (UNSW). This
study described the first pre-Pleistocene fossil material of a
tuatara-like
animal from New Zealand. This helps to bridge a gap in the global fossil
record
of Rhynchocephalia that previously spanned 70 million years. Dated
to 18
million years ago the fossil material is only slightly more recent than
the
Oligo-Miocene drowning event (25-22 Mya) which some have argued
completely
submerged New Zealand. The image is a humorous depiction of an ancestral
tuatara
(Sphenodon) sitting on an exaggeratedly small piece of land
during the
height of the drowning. Further details are available in the UCL
news
article. This work featured on the New
Scientist, National
Geographic, The Dragon's Tale, Scientific
Blogging, the Observer Magazine as well as in the research highlights section of Nature.
January
2009
Paul Barrett published a paper in Proceedings
of the Royal Society B in conjunction with Stig Walsh, Angela Milner
(both
Natural History Museum), Geoffrey Manley (Technische Universität
München), and
Larry Witmer (Ohio University).
This research found a method for assessing hearing in extinct reptiles and birds. For example, it shows that Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, had similar hearing capabilities to the modern emu.
The method involves measuring specific dimensions of the inner ear from CT data sets (such as that of the barn owl, Tyto alba, shown on the right).
Aspects of this work are
featured in a BBC news
article.
