For me, New Year is a time for looking back as well as
forward. Looking forward to the opportunities ahead and looking back to learn
lessons that we can apply in the future. Everyone in the lab has had a really
busy and productive year, with lots of standout achievements, but our fair
share of bumps in the road too. Below is a quick summary of some of these
achievements, many of which have been accomplished despite quite a few of us
facing some major personal challenges during 2017.
Last year saw the departure of four valued people from the
lab, the first being David Nicholson who moved in to the UK Civil Service, as a
Home Office statistician, following the completion of his postdoc. PhD student
Amy Waterson successfully defended her thesis on ecological niche occupancy in
deep time and also went on to work in government, in a role that combines her
expertise in climate change with a deep interest in public engagement. The
second was another former student Matt Baron, who defended his PhD thesis on
early dinosaur evolution in September. Matt is hoping to continue in the
subject and has some promising job prospects in store, so I’m sure we’ll be
hearing a lot more from him in the future. The third and final departure was
lab associate Lorna Steel, our former curator of fossil reptiles, who for
personal reasons decided to leave the NHM to pursue a new life in rural Wales
(which seems to be suiting her just fine). An amazing colleague, we were all
sad to see her go and will miss her stoicism and sense a fun a lot.
These departures have been balanced by new arrivals,
however, with two new PhD students Becky Lakin (based at the University of
Bath) and Tom Raven (at the University of Brighton), joining the lab. Becky’s
project is on the evolution of avian reproduction (supervised by Nick Longrich
and Dan Field), whereas Tom’s is on thyreophoran phylogeny (supervised by Susie
Maidment) and I look forward to seeing each of them in London more often. We’re
going to be joined by a whole host of new people in early 2018, with Susie
Maidment returning to the museum in a new permanent Researcher position. It
will be terrific to have another full-time dino person working at the NHM and
February can’t come soon enough. Two more new staff will be joining the lab in
February also and I’m delighted that David Button and Marc Jones will both be
starting on NERC-funded postdocs, working on a project that I’ll be running
with Laura Porro, so there should be exciting times ahead. We also had two short-term
MSc students in the lab this year, Joe Bonsor and Danielle Moraviec, who were
both great fun to have around.
Current lab members have spent a lot of time abroad this
year. Omar Regalado-Fernández had an extended research visit to a bunch of
major North American museums and Terri Cleary visited Pat Holroyd in Berkeley,
to get up to speed on fossil turtles. Richard Fallon visited New York, chasing
up letters relating to Arthur Conan Doyle’s The
Lost World. In another US trip, Simon Wills went to a new Morrison
Formation quarry in Wyoming to search for microvertebrates. João Vasco-Leite
had his first major research trip, taking in collections in Belgium, Germany
and Switzerland and the lab has been well represented with talks and posters at
meetings in Calgary (SVP: Omar, Matt, Terri, Selina Groh, Paul B.) and Munich
(EAVP: Serjoscha Evers, Paul B.), as well as in the UK (SVPCA and PalAss). Paul
B. and Terri were able to go on the SVP fieldtrip to Dinosaur Provincial Park,
which was stunning. Omar successfully upgraded to full PhD status and got a
Bogue Fellowship from UCL to support his US trip: João has also just found out that
he was also a Bogue, so will be off the US sometime in the spring of 2018. Paul
B. had an amazing fieldtrip to Zimbabwe in January 2017, together with
colleagues from the ESI (Johannesburg) and local colleagues in Zimbabwe,
looking for new dinosaur sites along the shores of Lake Kariba. Lots of
terrific new sites, with some surprising new material and the pleasure of
seeing elephants, hippos and crocs on our field sites on a daily basis. Paul B.
also finished off the year in Africa with a quick trip to Johannesburg to try
and finish some long running projects on early dinos. Serjoscha also got to do
some cool fieldwork, joining his former mentor Oliver Rauhut’s crew for a trip
prospecting in the Middle and Late Jurassic of New Zealand.
Most lab members have had their heads down this year getting
chapters ready for dissertations or gathering new data, so most of the
publications action has come from either Matt or Paul B. Terri has submitted
the first paper arising from her thesis (fingers crossed) and Selina and
Serjoscha have a bunch of things brewing. Matt has had a bumper year for
papers, getting chunks of his thesis published, most notably his new dinosaur
phylogeny, published in Nature, which
proposes a radical rearrangement of the dinosaur family tree (Baron et al.
2017a). This has had lots of comment online, huge media attention (making it to
#84 in the Altimetrics global listing for 2017), and has also generated
published debate (leading to another paper: Baron et al. 2017b). More fanfare
accompanied our suggestion that the enigmatic Chilesaurus might be an ornithischian (Baron & Barrett 2017),
which again is leading to another comment and response. Matt’s other papers
included one applying Bayesian methods to his phylogeny (Parry et al. 2017) and
his postcranial description of Lesothosaurus
in which we sank Stormbergia (Baron
et al. 2017c). Also related to our ongoing collaborations in South Africa,
Simon published a paper with a new GIS-based method for predicting fossil
occurrences in the field (Wills et al. 2018). Serjoscha and Paul B. were both invited
to be involved in a big project on plesiosaur inner ears that came out in Current Biology (Neenan et al. 2017).
Otherwise, most of the lab’s other outputs this year have
come from Paul B., with reviews of dinosaur quadrupedality (Barrett &
Maidment 2017) and the use of moment arms in vertebrate biomechanics, using
Sophie the Stegosaurus as an exemplar
(Brassey et al. 2017), papers on craniodental evolution and biomechanics in
sauropods (Button et al. 2017) and herbivorous dinosaurs in general (MacLaren
et al. 2017) and involvement in a policy statement on the use and storage of
digital data (Davies et al. 2017). A third Nature
paper was based on the naming of Teleocrater,
an early avemetatarsalian from the Middle Triassic of Tanzania (Nesbitt et al.
2017), which marks the beginning of the end for describing the NHM Manda
archosaur material (more to come in 2018). Finally, the team also got a paper
out describing the stratigraphy of the Vulcanodon
type locality, arising from our trip in January (Viglietti et al. 2018). Paul B.
also published a new popular science book on Stegosaurus, again based on Sophie.
Various honours, grants and prizes came our way, with
Serjoscha and Matt each receiving research grants to support their work (from
the Systematics Association and Christ’s College, Cambridge, respectively).
Selina had a great year, taking the prize for best talk at the NHM Student
Conference and being a finalist in the ‘Research Images as Art’ competition at
UCL. Richard received an
honorary mention for his submission to the British Society for Literature and
Science's ECR essay prize, which will be published in due course. Selina
also became the leader of the
500 Women Scientists London Pod this year, an organisation founded to empower
women and non-binary people and Simon took on a leadership role, joining the
Council of The Palaeontographical Society. Paul Varotis has been looking after
the finances of Les Amis du Museum (MNHN, Paris), which contributed to the
organisation of IPC5 in Paris, the training of doctoral students,
computerisation of their archives, and acquisition of new equipment. Finally,
Paul B. had his Honorary Professorship renewed at the ESI.
Many lab
members have also found time to do lots of outreach. Richard co-curated 'The
Art of Dinosaur Science' (at University of Nottingham Lakeside Arts) and
'The Victorian Studies Centre at 50' at the University of Leicester. Selina was
the runner-up in the cosplay competition at the London Comic Con and took place
in a mini version of SoapBox Science at UCL for Open Day. Paul B., Matt and
Terri all took place at various events in the NHM over the course of the year
and Paul B. made his first appearance at New
Scientist Live at the ExCel Centre, as well as participating in an
evolution masterclass at The Guardian
in addition to his usual involvement in other public lectures and media
appearances (including a museum project with Sir David Attenborough, TBA).
Phew. So,
on balance, a terrific year for the lab and the basis for what will hopefully
be a happy and successful 2018. We’re really looking forward to welcoming our
new arrivals and wish everyone a tremendously exciting and fulfilling New Year.
Baron,
M. G. & Barrett,
P. M. 2017. A dinosaur missing-link? Chilesaurus
and the early evolution of ornithischian dinosaurs. Biology Letters 13:
20170220. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2017.0220
Baron, M. G., Norman, D. B. & Barrett,
P. M. 2017a. A new hypothesis of dinosaur relationships and
early dinosaur evolution. Nature 543: 501–506. doi:10.1038/nature21700
Baron, M. G., Norman, D. B. & Barrett,
P. M. 2017b. Baron et al. reply. Nature 551: E4 - E5. doi:10.1038/nature24012
Baron, M. G., Norman, D. B. & Barrett,
P. M. 2017c. Postcranial anatomy of Lesothosaurus diagnosticus (Dinosauria:
Ornithischia) from the Lower Jurassic of southern Africa: implications for
basal ornithischian taxonomy and systematics. Zoological Journal of the
Linnean Society 179: 125–168. doi:10.1111/zoj.12434
Barrett, P. M.
& Maidment, S. C. R. 2017. The evolution of ornithischian quadrupedality. Journal
of Iberian Geology 43: 363–377. doi:10.1007/s41513-017-0036-0
Button, D. J.,
Barrett, P. M. & Rayfield, E. J. 2017. Craniodental
functional evolution in sauropodomorph dinosaurs. Paleobiology 43:
435–462. doi:10.1017/pab.2017.4
Brassey, C. A.,
Maidment, S. C. R. & Barrett,
P. M. 2017. Muscle moment arm analyses applied to vertebrate paleontology:
a case study using Stegosaurus stenops Marsh,
1887. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology
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Davies, T.G.,
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P. M., Bates, K. T., Bengtson, S., Benson, R. B. J., Boyer, D. M., Braga, J.,
Bright, J. A., Claessens, L. P. A. M., Cox, P. G., Dong, X.-P., Evans, A. R.,
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Jeffery, N. S., Johanson, Z., Lebrun, R., Martínez-Pérez, C., Marugán-Lobón, J.,
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M. R., Shubin, N. H., Smith, S. Y., Starck, J. M., Stringer, C., Summers, A. P.,
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Rayfield, E. J. & Donoghue, P. C. J. 2017. Open data and digital
morphology. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 284: 20170194. doi:10.1098/rspb.2017.0194
MacLaren, J. A.,
Anderson, P. S. L., Barrett, P. M. & Rayfield, E. J. 2017.
Herbivorous dinosaur jaw disparity and its relationship to extrinsic
evolutionary drivers. Paleobiology 43: 15–33. doi:10.1017/pab.2016.31
Neenan, J. M., Reich, T., Evers, S. W., Druckenmiller, P. S., Voeten, D. F. A. E., Choiniere,
J. N., Barrett, P. M., Pierce, S. E.
& Benson, R. B. J. 2017. Evolution of the sauropterygian labyrinth with
increasingly pelagic lifestyles. Current
Biology 27: 3852–3858
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.10.069.
Nesbitt, S. J.,
Butler, R. J., Ezcurra, M. D., Barrett, P. M., Stocker, M. R.,
Angielczyk, K. D., Smith, R. M. H., Sidor, C. A., Niedźwiedzki, G., Sennikov,
A. G. & Charig A. J. 2017. The earliest bird-line archosaurs and the
assembly of the dinosaur body plan. Nature 544: 484–487. doi:10.1038/nature22037
Parry, L. A., Baron, M. G. & Vinther, J. 2017. Multiple optimality criteria
support Ornithoscelida. Royal Society Open
Science 4: 170833. doi:10.1098/rsos.170833
Viglietti,
P. A., Barrett, P. M.,
Broderick, T. J., Munyikwa, D., MacNiven, R., Broderick, L., Chapelle, K.,
Glynn, D., Edwards, S., Zondo, M., Broderick, P. & Choiniere, J. N. 2018. Stratigraphy
of the Vulcanodon type locality and
its implications for regional correlations within the Karoo Supergroup. Journal of African Earth Sciences 137: 149–156. doi:10.1016/j.jafrearsci.2017.10.015
Wills, S.,
Choiniere, J. N. & Barrett, P. M.
2018, Predictive modelling of fossil-bearing locality distributions in the
Elliot Formation (Upper Triassic–Lower Jurassic), South Africa, using a
combined multivariate and spatial statistical analyses of present-day
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