What's In John's Freezer?

I’m a few months late on the six-year anniversary of this blog but finally found some time. (For year 5 go here) It was seemed to be another quiet year on the blog because it was not a quiet year for work or other aspects of life. The DAWNDINOS project got into full swing and there will be a lot more about that soon on that website and maybe here, too.

Freeezersaurus 2 has been mostly vacated now; and Freezersaurus 3 is in place, with the contents shifted– and a mad rush in action to get rid of (boil down + varnish bones of) as many specimens as I can! I have way too many… of course, mostly elephant bits. Here are the last big bits left in Freezersaurus 2; we are intimidated to move them…

Stomach-Churning Rating: 3/10 until the opossum-digested-by-gator at the end, then 9/10, so hang tight!

Year 6 began with a post about a new paper! We published a big synthesis of data on what mammals turn their kneecaps into bone (or not), and how those states evolved. The story turned out pretty interesting and we are still pursuing some angles that it inspired, so stay tuned! Otherwise, the kneecap project (i.e. Leverhulme grant) has ended and staff/students have moved on (but published all their papers on it– well done, Sophie, Kyle and Viv!!), so it will fall quiet on that topic for a while.

Then we published another paper, and it happened to involve more sesamoid-y stuff! But with birds and their ankles, and some tantalizing evidence of soft tissue and organic biomolecular preservation. I’m still a bit amazed this paper happened and am pleased we got to collaborate on it.

Next, I got to ramble on a bit, about another serious topic related to science– this time, on blame.  I had forgotten about that post, and now on re-reading it it has fresh new relevance to me. All the more reason to keep blogging!

Smaller but better: Freezersaurus 3, part of a proud dynasty!

But then, what do you know, we published another kneecap paper! And on ostriches! With some simple but ambitious finite element analysis. We are meaning to get back to this approach… it just scratched the surface of some super cool “mechanobiology” that could shed light on “evo-devo”.

And next, BOOM! The dinosaurs dawned. By which I mean my current ERC grant “DAWNDINOS” began. Do take a look– the website now has some lovely NEW palaeo-art by Bob Nicholls, John Conway and Scott Hartman, with more to come! This project’s inception led to an inspection of caeca in tinamous; the following post.

I managed to have some summer holiday in the midst of the year, and that made an extremely memorable “pilgrimage” to a fossil site possible– “Experiencing the Irish Tetrapod Tracks” was the blog post that emerged from the waters. (That post needs a little revamp in light of some other literature; I will get around to that soon)

DAWNDINOS got a nice new 3D printer and we’re gradually printing up some archosaurs to show.

Holiday ended and back to the freezer I went, to post about how we thaw specimens (and how odd wallaby legs can be). Then we published three papers in quick succession and I played catchup posting about them (Mussaurus forelimbs; mouse vs. human hindlimb simulations; and tetrapod forelimb musculature).

Speaking of mouse hindlimb simulations, I didn’t blog about this related paper that we published earlier in 2018, but it’s very relevant. And GIF-worthy!

But I couldn’t stay away from bird legs for long, and so soon enough I posted “The Bird Knee Challenge“, which still stands.

Jumbo the elephant loomed into view at Christmas-time (plus a documentary about T. rex with Chris Packham, and another about Hannibal’s elephant excursion over the Alps– the latter also playing on PBS in USA); all featuring cameos with me, so I posted about the Jumbo/Attenborough one. That’s another life experience I will treasure.

Next, back to musing about science and humanity– and who’s a more big-name, very relatable human scientist than Darwin? Well, we could debate that endlessly but I posted about Darwin’s human nature for Darwin Day.

That takes me through to March 2017. I’ve posted a little more since then but that counts as Year 7 of this blog, so we’ll catch up with that then. Looking back on ~2017, I posted more blog posts than I thought I did! Maybe it’s just that 2018 feels very quiet to me blog-wise. We’ll see how it shapes up though.

Years ago, my team dissected an alligator (for Allen et al. 2010,2014 papers if you are keeping track) that had an opposum in its stomach, during winter when feeding wasn’t supposed to be happening much. So that came up again this year; and hopefully it does not make anything come up from your stomach. But this is real anatomy in action.