Trinity College Dublin, Ecology and Evolution
As scientists with access to hundreds of peer reviewed journals its easy to forget that we are a privileged bunch. We get to read science straight from the horse’s mouth without anyone to get between us and the research. Yet for the majority of people journals are hidden behind paywalls and even open access journals …
In my last post I wrote about the case for scientific whaling. I tried to be objective and leave moral and ethical considerations out of the discussion to focus solely on the science. Yet it is impossible to avoid these considerations for long. The use of animals in scientific research has a long history …
Continue reading “Killing in the Name of Science (Part 2): What About the Bunnies?”
Part of our series of posts by final-year undergraduate students for their Research Comprehension module. Students write blogs inspired by guest lecturers in our Evolutionary Biology and Ecology seminar series in the School of Natural Sciences. This week; views from Sarah Byrne and Sean Meehan on Tom Ezard’s seminar, Birth, death and macroevolutionary consequences. Splitting Hares …
Continue reading “Seminar series: Tom Ezard, University of Southampton”
Apologies in advance for this perhaps unconstructive rant! But I’ve found the process cathartic after spending my whole holiday worrying that someone nearby was going to get kicked, crushed or eaten through their own stupidity! For my summer holiday this year I spent a week in Yellowstone National Park in the USA. It was awesome …
Over the last month or so you’ll probably have noticed that a lot of posts on EcoEvo@TCD are essentially “what I did on my summer holidays” essays. Luckily, I think most of us did quite a lot of interesting and scientifically relevant things! My summer this year seemed to be full of conferences, so I …
As I wrote in a previous post last winter, O’Leary et al. added their oar into the Placental Mammal origins debate. For anyone who missed that episode, they argued, with the backing of masses of morphological data, that placental mammal orders appeared right after the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs (also known as the explosive model). …
Continue reading “The Placental mammal saga; special summer double episode”
Nature News published a new post about our origins. It’s promoting Stevens et al’s 2013 paper that published the description from two new granddads/grandmas in our already complicated family tree. These guys, Nsungwepithecus and Rukwapithecus (it’s not that hard to pronounce, try it) are considered by Stevens and his team as the oldest crown Catarrhines …
The Toco Toucan (Ramphastos toco) is the largest species in the toucan family but not only that, it has the largest bill relative to body size of all birds. As with most things in Zoology the function of the bill has been hotly debated, even Darwin himself weighed in …
On the 15th and 16th April we had one of my favourite events at Trinity College Dublin: the annual School of Natural Sciences Postgraduate Symposium. Over the course of two days many of our PhD students presented their work to the School. We also had two amazing plenary talks from Dr Nick Isaac (CEH) and …
Continue reading “School of Natural Sciences Postgraduate Symposium: Part 3/4”
In light of the current stresses of exam season, I have been contemplating my parallel educational history. Of equal, if not superior, importance to any stage of my conventional academic life, I have had a Disney education. If I visit medieval castles or forts rich in feudal history I can’t help but mentally locate Rapunzel’s …