I told a group of students a while ago that we had red pandas in North America until “relatively recently.” Big mistake. “Wait,” one stopped me. “What do you mean by ‘relatively recently?’” Oh, you know. 4.5 million years. I don’t know if paleo cultivates the temporal mind, or if the temporal […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Last week I attended the 100th Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Baltimore. Happy Birthday, ESA! It also occurred to me that I’ve been going to ESA for ten years now (which means I’ve attended 10% of ESA’s!)– my very first was in Montreal in 2005, in the summer […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
For decades, paleontology was broadly a descriptive science; it was seen by many as a novelty, but not necessarily relevant to the study of modern systems. This has changed as our field has become more quantitative, but also as methodological advances have led to better dating and data that have allowed […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
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 […]
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
I’m at the Ecological Society of America meetings this week, so invited grad students Meghan Balk and Catalina Pimiento to write a guest post to coincide with Shark Week. Little did I know that this post would be so timely, with Discovery’s disastrous fake documentary on Megalodon! I hope you enjoy reading about these […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” – Palynology A colleague of mine (also a paleoecologist) recently recounted a story where, when learning about his research, a senior scientist remarked, “I thought pollen was dead?” This is never something someone wants to hear about one’s primary methodology, particularly at […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Plants have sex. While flowers, cones, and fruits– basically the vaginas and uteruses of the plant world– feature prominently in human cultures, much of the actual, er, act of plant sex is invisible to us. As northerners dig out from under record-breaking snowfalls and eye the ground for the first crocuses and […]
Estimated reading time: 16 minutes
Last month, I spent a couple of days in Oxford with a group of paleoecologists of many nationalities, timescales, and taxonomic foci, as we frantically narrowed down a list of more than nine hundred crowd-sourced questions to fifty. Our mission: to determine the most pressing, five-year-horizon-scanning questions in the field of […]
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Paleoecology has really blossomed as a field in the last decades, due in large part to increasing concerns about climate and the environment. It’s always been a strong, dynamic field, going back almost a century ago if you start with the very first modern pollen analyst, von Post, but recently […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
There are five letters in this week’s PNAS, responding to an article by Isabel Israde-Alcántara et al., that came out earlier this year on purported impact markers in Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico. In one letter (Gill et al. 2012), my coauthors (Jessica Blois, Simon Goring, Jenn Marlon, Pat Bartlein, Andrew Scott, and Cathy […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute