Congratulations to Rob Brocklehurst for publishing the first paper from his MSc project. This looks at the differences between the cranial muscles of fish that feed by suction feeding and those that feed by biting. The paper is published in the Journal of Anatomy.
Many congratulations to Antonio Ballell Mayoral for publishing his MSc research on crocodylomorph cranial biomechanics and functional evolution in the journal Palaeontology. You can read more about this work here and you can read the full paper here.
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.
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.
