Dave Hone's Archosaur Musings

A few things have cropped up in the last couple of days that are worth commenting on, but not necessarily needing a whole post each, so I’ll just cram them all together here.

Having just put up a bunch of posts on the importance of science communication and science education I have been directed to this little site: ‘why science’ which seems to be dealing with the same issue directly from academics. It’s clearly not been going long and will soon add up to quite a resource, but it well worth checking out.

In a similar vein, a contributor to why science, Dr Adam Rutherford is the presented of this great half-hour feature on teaching evolution in UK schools, based at the Guardian newspaper (home, of course, of bad science). I found it most interesting and there were some great ideas in there of interest, I think, to any teacher of evolution.

That piece in turn featured Dr Jeremy Pritchard who speaks eloquently on the problems of science communication and clearly does a stellar job of getting his science across to the public. In fact, I was so impressed I contacted him about it and he put me onto this site he runs of teching resources which I’ll link to for any who might be interested.

Finally, coming up shortly this week, a guest post on a little known stegosaurian by my friend Dr Susie Maidment. And just to make sure this post isn’t completely dull, have a photo of a nice picture of an IVPP shipping crate with a little theropod stencil on it. It’s actually vaguely relevant as it’s from the IVPP’s storage site out in the Beijing suburbs that I hope to visit again this week to collect some pterosaur skulls, check soem dromaeosaur teeth and take a few photos of sauropod bones. No rest for the wicked.

Well, apart from the endless hold-ups and issues of trying to get into Beijing from 1000 km away during the olympics – joy. Still, I made it back yesterday and have been desperately catching up on 3 weeks worth of e-mails since, plus in less than a week I am off to Mexico for a full month with my ptero-buddy Dino Frey. As a result you can probably gues how busy I am with both a backlog of stuff to clear out and various upcoming things that I want to try and take care of before I leave.

As promised you will shortly get a flurry of posts of things I held back during my absence and I suspect I will have better internet access in Mexico than Inner Mongolia and thus hopefully I can put up a post or two when we cross through some towns and cities. I will at least try and get a few posts up about the fieldwork with some pretty pictures but do bear with me and remember that I will shortly be away again and this time for longer.