Congratulations to all of the Palaeobiology MSc students who graduated today! Special congratulations go to Jodie Murphy who won the David Dineley Prize, which is awarded annually to the student with the best MSc thesis of the cohort. Jodie won for her outstanding thesis on ‘The distribution of homoplasy in morphological datasets’.
Congratulations to Richie Howard who has published his MSc project on the evolution and terrestrialization of scorpions. Richie, who is now a PhD student in Exeter has published his findings in the journal Organisms, Diversity & Evolution and it is available open access here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13127-019-00390-7
Here’s one of our great Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology graduates Emma Schachner, surveying her very successful career so far. As she says, The Bristol MSc ‘was like boot camp for paleontology. They throw you in the deep end and see if you can sink or swim. I loved it, and then came back to the US for my PhD.’ She is now a Professor at LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans, where she uses her palaeontological skills, combined with remarkable artistic skills, and a love of vertebrate anatomy to study questions about the evolution of physiology and the origin of the dinosaurs.
Congratulations to Antonio Ballell Mayoral who has won the Geologist’s Association’s Curry MSc Prize. This award is for the best MSc thesis in the country on an Earth Science topic and has a £1000 prize. Antonio won for his thesis on morphofunctional trends in Crocodylomorpha. Antonio is the third Bristol Palaeobiology student to win this prize after Nick Crumpton in 2010 and Karina Vanadzina in 2017.
