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.

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‘Full fathom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’

(Shakespeare’s The Tempest Act 1, Scene 2)

Stomach-Churning Rating: 1/10- this time, tame images.

Five years have passed on this blog now, and this year with them passed Freezersaurus (soon to leave RVC’s campus; sob!). Indeed, the blog has changed, via the tempests I’ve weathered in my own life, which I lamented in last year’s summary. Regardless, the blog has been visited this year more than in any prior year, with >101,000 visits– thanks!

This year I’ll keep my annual retrospective shorter than usual, as I’m feeling healthier and more energetic but less self-indulgent.

I still got to have fun, like this ComicCon in NOLA. So, some self-indulgence.

I began the past year by blogging about why I blog, and how I feel that in a way I (and others) have long been blogging even if it wasn’t called that, and how I don’t see science communication such as blogging or tweeting as something distinct from science itself. Reading back on that post, I find some themes there that emerge again and again throughout this year’s posts, such as valuing diversity (in its diverse forms) and curiosity.

Like this you do? So much more here there is!

Never tired of elephant feet will I be!

Those introspective posts included one that is very close to my heart, about how I notice my own decline (some of it since reversed, but some still lingering) and feel grief. It wasn’t long after that post that I wrote more about my experience as an epileptic; what it’s like to have a seizure. Another, more science-focused (but still very human) one laid out my views on what my team’s principles are. Then I returned a few posts later with some reflection on how time passes (too quickly!) and with it come publications (I reviewed some of my team’s latest), among other changes as a person living as an academic. I wrote then that “I suspect I’ll look back on 2016 and see it as transformative, but it hasn’t been an easy year either, to say the least.” Yep. Spot on. I’ve started a big new grant which has been a huge challenge, and I’ve rediscovered my health and some of my old self with it, rekindling some passion and hope. Later, on USA’s Thanksgiving, I typed in some musings about my appreciation for diversity in the human world. Again, with thoughts of disturbing recent political/social trends weighing heavily on me, I celebrated how the Women’s March inspired me, and how that relates to the importance of curiosity and empathy.

He ain’t goin’ nowhere.

But there was plenty of time here to talk about freezers and anatomy and research, too! We published a paper that I think I’ll long regard as one of our better ones, on using dynamic computer simulations to study how ostriches control their walking and running gaits with their muscles. Throughout 2016, we worked hard to get our anatomical research out there to the public in person. So I posted about our presentations at the Cheltenham Science Festival (including a public cheetah dissection, which was a huge hit!), and “Team Cat” did a dissection of another cheetah (all zoo mortalities) at the RVC for a well-attended joint event with UCL/Grant Museum on “Wild Cats Uncovered: movement evolves“. UCL’s PhD student (soon Dr.) Marcela Randau wrote a great guest post about our paper on how size and ecology relate to the shapes of backbones in cats, which tied in nicely with those big cat dissection presentations. I also ruminated about how scientists balance testing big questions vs. getting very accurate data, using the big question (in my and others’ research) about how much more slowly big animals can move relative to smaller ones as an example. As a final anatomical post this blog-year, I wrote about the biceps muscle, and people seemed to like that, so I will do more of those.

Whale humeral epiphysis (joint) turned into a sculpture with walrus ivory teeth, at Point Vicente Museum, LA.

In addition to being open about my (and my team’s) thoughts, experiences, dissections and publications, we put a lot of effort this year into making our scientific and anatomical data public. My blog posts about our huuuuuge open datasets on crocodile and tuatara 3D scans exemplify a deluge of data that is going to keep coming out. We’re going to push very hard on this, including an effort to release old data from prior publications of mine. I’m thrilled that we can finally deliver on these things; it is a great feeling!

Yale Peabody Museum specimen YPM57100: right ilium (hip bone) and vertebrae of the Triassic archosaur Poposaurus. More about this later!

We enter year 6 of this blog with a new (temporary, maybe) freezer, which we failed to reach a conclusion on naming. I’m sure you’re on tenterhooks awaiting the final decision. I have a bunch of ideas for some blog posts to come soon (really fun anatomical papers en route), and I always welcome guest posts so let me know if you want to do one! In the meantime, I sprinkled some images from my 2016-7 travels here in this post. With good health comes more ability to go do fun things that I’ve put off while recovering, so hopefully 2017-8 will provide some new images to share.

A sunny Sceloporus fence lizard seen in LA. Meanwhile, the UK awaits some sunshine…

I doth not protest too much, methinks– there have been some good times this past year, and ides of March be damned, I look forward to sharing more science here for year 6!

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