Can’t believe it’s been seven months since the last update! Goodbye 2017 you were pretty much as sucky as 2016 was but in a different way. It’s been a busy couple of months and unfortunately my writing juices have been sucked away by other endeavours, including an exciting book chapter which I’ve been very keen on writing for a while.
Here’s some of the more recent natural history and museum stuff I’ve been working on and contributed to from around the web, corralled into one place.
Underwhelming Fossil Fish of the Month for the Grant Museum of Zoology continues with a steady stream of underwhelming palaeontological content. The most recent entry is notable for its resemblance to a moustache and before that was an extremely underwhelming lobe-finned fossil (with out the lobed fins) revealing the surprising origins of the word Thursday (nothing to do with fossil fish).
Lost Worlds Revisited at the Guardian I’m very lucky to share the blog with such talented colleagues, my recent posts have examined the surprising gaps in our knowledge when it comes to what common fossils, ammonites, actually looked like and some of the fun with zombie, ghost and PPI taxa in the fossil record.
Natural Histories BBC Radio 4 Again very privileged to share the digital airwaves with some true luminaries in dodo research on a Natural Histories episode on the dodo. I talk about the amazing specimen in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and there will be some more dodo content coming soon….
From a dodo to more than a dodo. A number of ideas and projects for the Oxford University Museum of Natural History have started to come to a head and a steady pace of content is coming out of the museum blog. We’ve started a new series called FAQ Answered, the first (and most frequent) question we get asked is Is it real? Part one on taxidermy and part two on skeletons are out now. More to come from me and colleagues in this series.
Nautilus, nautilus or nautilus? Most recently another blog post for OUMNH came out about the three ‘spiralled’ animals which are called nautilus. In my role at the OUMNH, I try to stay impartial to all the wonderful animal groups that fall under my management but in this instance I was asked to talk about nautiluses at a poetry anthology launch and talking to colleagues about these amazing animals ended up with me being asked to write about them!
That’s how for now. There’s a bunch of other writing in the works and potentially some content for my own blog. Promises, promises….
Fistful Of Cinctans 