It’s no secret that science funding rates are, in a word, abysmal*. As a pre-tenure faculty member, this has been weighing heavily on my mind, and I’ve devoted a substantial portion of my year to grant writing (fingers crossed!). There’s a running joke that you typically get funded to do […]
I don’t want to write about women in science today. I want to write about glaciers, or passenger pigeons, or the way the tilt of the earth is making the squirrels outside my window stash acorns, or about how sharks have been on this planet longer than trees, or why sometimes, the public doesn’t trust […]
Richard Dawkins is at it again. This isn’t the first time he’s made inappropriate or offensive comments, and this infographic nicely illustrates the perpetual cycle of eye-rolling and submission as the people who call him out get fed up and ultimately disengage. What frustrates me so much about Dawkins is that […]
This is the second of a multi-part series on climate change at different timescales. The first part dealt with drivers on tectonic scales — millions of years. This part deals with the primary drivers of climate change from hundreds of thousands to thousands of years. Future posts will include millennial […]
As a scientist, there are places I want to visit one day because they feature heavily into the intellectual mythology of my field: Darwin’s Down House, Mount Chimborazo, the Galapagos. At the top of the list, my scientific Mecca has been the fossil-rich Pleistocene tar pits at Rancho La Brea. […]
You can’t go far on the internet these days without stumbling upon a story of someone leaving academia. These are important stories, and it’s good that people are sharing them. These authors are often making valid critiques about Academia and the state of research funding, and are opening up a really […]
The horse has a complex and fascinating environmental history. Wild horses have become such an icon of the American west that it’s easy to forget that humans introduced them to the continent five hundred years ago, during the age of European exploration. Horses quickly became part of Native American livelihoods and played an integral role in […]
Sloth-moth symbiosis. Dinosaur-devestating asteroid impacts. Girl’s preference for pink. Are these fact, or fiction? Sometimes, what we think we know about the natural world is based more on story-telling than the scientific method. Calling something a “just-so story” in science is almost universally intended as a criticism. The term is a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s collection […]
The mammoth is actively contemplating — perhaps a bit too much!– but as you can see, this blog has been a little neglected since I started my faculty position last fall. I’ve got a nice series of posts lined up, but to kick things off again, here’s a great contribution […]
What happens when large herbivores disappear from landscapes? Much of my research to date has used the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna as a natural experiment, documenting the cascading effects of the loss of large herbivores on the plant communities they left behind. To do this, I marshall the paleoecological […]
The Contemplative Mammoth 