So the last few days have been quite eventful for me... 

There are some renovations happening two floors above my office. Due to miscommunication /misinterpretation of orders (pro-tip: when somebody tells you not to do something, DON'T DO IT), a 500 L tank decided to empty itself into my office ceiling on Saturday, resulting in water raining down on mine and my colleagues desks. Onto our bookshelves, onto our computers. 

Cue panic.

Even though I wasn't there at the time, from what I heard the first responders acted quickly and effectively. Boards were lain across books to protect them, computers and peripherals shifted as far as possible out of direct harm, and power cables unplugged (from the computers, without touching wall sockets). But there was a lot of water, and some damage was unavoidable.

I found out about this on Saturday at 2pm. I rushed to my office, but by the time I arrived most of the water had been mopped up, and a dehumidifier placed in the centre of the room. I tried to dry the worst damaged books, looked for any damage at my colleagues desks, and took a lot of photos for insurance purposes. I was hoping that my computer and external hard-drive would be ok, as they weren't turned on when they got wet, and therefore shouldn't have short-circuited. But I had to wait til Monday for electricians to properly assess the damage. 

Damage report? The computer and external hard-drive still work! Amazing! I was extremely happy when I found this out! However, my new (as of last week) solar wireless keyboard and numpad did not fair so well. All of these items are going to get replaced under insurance, but at least I can recover data.

Now, here is the public service announcement:

I keep all my important work on Dropbox, so I was never in any real danger of losing data (to the huge relief of all involved),  just very inconvenienced by the loss of hardware/software. But the moral of this story is that you can never predict what could happen to your belongings, at home or in the office. Especially indoor rain.

Apart from the first paper by Zhao (1993) describing K. gobiensis, it is difficult to locate detailed descriptions or investigations regarding this sauropod. This is likely due to the preparation and preservation of the fossil skeleton, or lack thereof. Apparently, after the fossilised remains of K. gobiensis were excavated and transported back to Beijing in 1985, "... extreme fluctuation in ambient temperature and humidity" (Zhao, 1993, pg 1) started to disintegrate the remains . I wonder how much of it, if any, now still exists.

References
Upchurch, P., Barrett, P. M., and Dodson, P. 2004. Sauropoda. IN: Weishampel, D. B., Osmolska, H., and Dodson, P. (eds.), The Dinosauria (2nd edition). University of California Press, Berkeley, pp 259-322

Zhao, X., 1993. A new mid-Jurassic sauropod (Klamelisaurus gobiensis gen. et sp. nov.) from Xinjiang, China. Vertebrata PalAsiatica 31(2): 132-138

This is a lovely piece of artwork, but as I'm about to argue, perhaps not the best diagram of taphonomic processes:

Figure 9.2 from Hanson (1980), illustrating (among other things) the influence of fluvial processes on the preservation state of animal remains.

I know that taphonomy is a complicated subject to try and represent pictorially. It covers a range of different processes (biological and geological), at a range of different scales (including small scale microbial to large scale global weather patterns), at different locations (above ground, below ground, terrestrial vs. aquatic) and so on... but surely that calls for less complicated diagrams, not more complicated?

I think the artistic element of this diagram is a nice touch, albiet a confusing one. And the colour coding of artistic elements (black cogs vs. white cogs), with the addition of labels containing upper and lower case letters along with subscript letters and numbers just makes this figure incredibly difficult to parse. It's fair to mention that this figure was published in a conference proceedings volume, not a scientific journal. But regardless, the unfortunate result is that interesting but complicated reading matter is now made much more complicated.

Hanson, C. B., 1980. Fluvial taphonomic processes: models and experiments IN Behrensmeyer, A. K., Hill, A. P., 1988. Fossils in the Making: Vertebrate Taphonomy and Paleoecology. The University of Chicago Press, USA, pp 156-182.

Although the average person may not have heard of Juravenator starki, it's certainly well known to palaeontologists, due to its near perfect preservation. All the skeletal elements are present, except for the last third of the tail. There's even soft tissue preservation, along the tibiae (lower leg) and between the 8th and 22nd caudal vertebrae (part of the tail) (Göhlich et al., 2006). Because of this fantastic preservation it has been included in numerous papers, including those focusing on its anatomy (Chiappe et al., 2010), estimated body size (Therrien et al., 2007), eye function and possible nocturnality (Schmitz et al., 2011), phylogenetic relationships (Butler et al., 2007), and of course, taphonomy (Reisdorf et al., 2012).

A number of coelurosaurs  have been found possessing fossilised feathers or feather-like structures. J. starki is also a coelurosaur, however the authors found an, "...absence of feathers or feather-like structures..." in this specimen, including no evidence of structures that would support feathers in the preserved soft tissue. You might expect that in an almost perfectly preserved specimen such as this, if there were any feathers present then they would have been fossilised. But absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. And quite rightly, the authors point out that changes in season or growth stages may influence the presence or absence of feathers.

Look at this beautifully preserved holotype! Everything is in place, except for the tip of the tail. Soft tissue imprints around the tail are labelled 'st'.

References
Butler, R. J., Upchurch, P. 2007. Highly incomplete taxa and the phylogenetic relationships of the     theropod dinosaur Juravenator starki. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27(1), 253-256.

Chiappe, L. M., Göhlich, U. B. 2010. Anatomy of Juravenator starki (Theropoda: Coelurosauria)         from the Late Jurassic of Germany. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie -                 Abhandlungen 258(3), 257-296.

Göhlich, U. B., Chiappe, L. M. 2006. A new carnivorous dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Solnhofen     archipelago. Nature 440, 329-332.

Reisdorf, A. G., Wuttke, M. (2012). Re-evaluating Moodie’s Opisthotonic-Posture Hypothesis in         Fossil Vertebrates Part I : Reptiles — the taphonomy of the bipedal dinosaurs Compsognathus     longipes and Juravenator starki from the Solnhofen Archipelago (Jurassic, Germany).                 Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments 92 (1), 119-168.

Schmitz, L., Motani, R. 2011. Nocturnality in Dinosaurs Inferred from Scleral Ring and Orbit             Morphology. Science 332 (6030), 705-708.

Therrien, F., Henderson, D. M. 2007. My theropod is bigger than yours … or not: estimating body     size from skull length in theropods. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 27(1),  108-115.

Just saw these fossil-dig themed cupcakes, and wow! They're so detailed!

Photos courtesy of tikkido

Well this is perfect timing! Just when I've been looking motivational advice, I'm going to push myself to write more of my first PhD paper during November, encouraged by the creation of AcWriMo: Academic Writing Month.

This idea follows that of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), to encourage novelists to set lofty writing goals, such as writing an entire 50,000 word novel in a month! Using this same concept, AcWriMo has been established to encourage academic authors to be more productive with their scientific paper and book writing. Although some have warned about the folly of writing just for the sake of hitting a word count limit, and not because you have something useful or meaningful to say. So I think that the combination of social accountability along with realistic goals that push you to your limits will work best for me.

So what are my goals? To avoid the problem of word count limits, a time based goal seems the best option. However, I have tried that before in the past and failed. I set up 30 minute blocks for writing, with 5 minute breaks in-between, but found that I would focus on the time ticking by rather than my work. And sometimes didn't want to stop every 30 minutes, and when I did, would completely lose my train of thought.

As a quick exercise, I decided to try writing 250 words on my paper before I continued writing this post... and it worked! I wasn't focused on the clock, and I only let myself check to word limit when I felt like I had nothing else to write. So this is my plan:

1. Write 500 words per working day on my first paper (but if I'm in the mood to keep writing, I can keep going over this limit).

2. Analyse the data for my first paper only after having written 500 words.

I'll double check that these goals are working for me as the month rolls on, and increase the word limit per day if necessary. So wish me luck! Or better still, wish me perseverance, determination... and fun!