Month: March 2019

Many congratulations to Neil Adams for publishing his MSc thesis on competition between rodents and extinct multituberculate mammals. The paper is published in Royal Society Open Science and you can read it here.

Here’s former Bristol MSc in Palaeobiology student, Emma Schachner, now a Professor at LSU School of Medicine, New Orleans, presenting her TED talk yesterday, on the evolution of vertebrate lungs. This is what Bristol MSc graduates do.

Congratulations to Adam Smith, curator of natural sciences, Nottingham City Council, who completed the MSc in Palaeobiology in 2003, and a PhD on plesiosaurs, in Dublin, in 2007. Adam has just been awarded a share of a grant of £200,000 awarded to seven curators in various museums around the country. His proposal is to research and display the museum’s nationally significant herbarium collection.

The Headley Fellowships with Art Fund is designed to help curators take time away from their day-to-day responsibilities to carry out in-depth research into their museum’s collection. The funding is linked to the ongoing decline in public spending on museums and galleries in England, which has fallen 13% in real terms over the past decade.

During his time in Nottingham, Adam has staged several highly successful exhibitions, including a massive exhibition in 2017 and 2018 on Chinese dinosaurs.

More details of the award are here.

Here is Adam, hiding down at bottom left (green trousers), behind Chris Packham, who opened the dinosaur exhibition in 2017.

 

Bethany Allen, who graduated from the MSc in 2017 and is working on her PhD at the University of Leeds, writes about her active outreach and engagement work here.

Bethany fossil hunting in the Lias at Robin Hood’s Bay, Yorkshire.