This is why we want equality, and equal representation for women in science... so we can JUST TALK ABOUT OUR RESEARCH like anyone else!

Have you ever stumbled across a bone, perhaps while walking around the city or countryside, and wondered what type of bone it is, and what animal it belonged to? Maybe you're unsure if you're looking at left-over soup bones, or have found the first evidence of a rare species in your area. If so, have a look at this new database of bone photographs called BoneID.

The database is in its early days, so at the moment it only has images of mainly North American animal bones. But is still interesting to browse the website and see the variation in bone shapes between alligators, owls, and raccoons. You can always search their Facebook group page to see if other bone enthusiasts can help you with your bone identification.

If you have any images of animal bones you can send to the website creator, photographed from standard anatomical angles (anterior, posterior, cranial, caudal, lateral, inferior, superior, etc.), then be sure to let them know! I have quite a few saltwater crocodile bone photos I'll be sending their way...

This crisp and dynamic illustration of a Protoceratops is one of the featured dinosaurs from the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs (ISMD), established by palaeontologist Bolortsetseg Minjin (who has been instrumental in repatriating fossils stolen from the Gobi Desert for auction in the USA).

Two weeks ago, a group of scientists started chatting on Twitter about carnivores and their prey, and started sharing gory pictures of carcasses. Things got a little (lightheartedly) competitive, and after Julien Fattebert shared a photo of a leopard cub killed by lions, and added the hashtag #bestcarcass, a Twitter battle was born.

Since then, Twitter users have shared fascinating, strange, and sometimes disturbing images of decaying animals from all over the world in weird and wonderful poses.

Listed below are my top 10 picks (in no particular order) for some of the most taphonomically interesting #bestcarcass contenders. And, unsurprisingly, some people may find the follow images disturbing: click 'read more' at your own peril...

I submitted my PhD thesis in September 2016, and got word back a few weeks before Christmas that it had been accepted by the university for the award of my degree! Barring a few changes, of course. Technically, my thesis has been 'accepted with changes'.

For those who don't know how the process works:

1. 1. You submit your thesis to the university graduate school, along with a list of people who you think are expert enough to read and peer review it.
2. 2. The university sends the thesis to two of these experts.
3. 3. The experts read the thesis, note down edits they would like you to make, and then send it back to the graduate school along with a recommendation to 'accept with changes', 'accept with changes and review', 'revise and resubmit', or 'no changes required'.
4. 4. The university then sends their recommendation and edits (if required) to you.
5. 5. In my case, which is 'accept with changes', you have 3 months to make these edits and upload the revised thesis for the graduate school to examine.
6. 6. Then, if the graduate school is happy with the revisions, you upload a THIRD and final version of the thesis.
7. 7. Now you can breathe!

It would have been lovely to recieve it back with 'no changes required', but hey, it would be wonderful to submit perfectly written papers for peer review and not need changes to them too, but we aren't all perfect! 

I'll add one more reason to the list: because there's a photoshoot and you can't convince the photographer that science does indeed happen in the absence of labcoats.

I use Mendeley as my reference manager, and will sing its praises to anyone I meet asking what citation software they should use for writing research manuscripts. It's super easy to import article PDFs into your virtual library, ask it to 'watch folders' for new PDFs you've downloaded, has a pretty good stab at labelling articles in your library by looking at the metadata, and cites-while-you-write with its MS Word plug-in.

​You can even highlight passages and jot down notes within each PDF in the form of floating sticky notes, called 'annotations'.

​​But I wish that those annotations were more accessible in their own right.

You might, for example, read a paper in Mendeley about the taphonomy of mammal carcasses. There's an interesting line about teeth: that while they are more resistant to weathering than bones, they can still crack and split in hot and dry environments. You highlight this sentence and add an annotation with your thoughts. 

But how do you find that annotation at a later date? Until you read that paper again, you might not remember that it even exists.

Mendeley does not allow you to view all annotations you've ever created, or even indicate which PDFs either do or don't have annotations. If you remember reading something interesting and writing something about it, you better hope that you remember what you wrote, as you can find annotations by searching for key words within them. And if you're like me and just want to review your past notes, good luck trying to remember all the papers you've added annotations to over the last 6 months.

​There are, of course, work-arounds for this: you could tag all papers you add annotations to with a key word such as 'Annotations' or mark each paper with the 'favourite' star symbol, but this relies on you never forgetting to include this step.

You could copy the contents of each annotation in to an Excel spreadsheet or mind map, and group them by theme. That way you can review your database or mindmap and find your way back to the original paper. But this feels like double handling - why not just write the annotation in the mind map in the first place? What I would LOVE is a mind-mapping tool within Mendeley, where you could click and drag annotations on to nodes/branches, but I realise this could be nightmarish to code and implement.

I can't say I've come up with a solid solution for this problem yet. Has anyone else figured out a better annotation workflow for Mendeley, or do you use other software and reference manager combinations to keep track of your research notes?

Geology is an important component of any taphonomic investigation. This helps to 'set the scene' when considering potential taphonomic pathways: what environment did these ancient creatures live in? What happened to their bodies after they died? What environment were they buried in, and how quickly were they buried?

To this end, my colleagues and I have just published a paper about the ancient environment of the Winton Formation at Isisford to better understand the taphonomic history of crocodyliforms, osteichthyan fish, and dinosaur fossils uncovered there. We propose that around 100 million years ago, Isisford lay in the middle of a river delta that flowed into the nearby Eromanga Sea. 

We came to this conclusion by studying the sandstone concretions that encase each of the fossils found at Isisford. These concretions formed when sand grains were cemented together with calcium carbonate (calcite) from calcium-rich groundwater. The majority of fossils appear not to be distorted or warped in any way, and as fossilisation occurs under high temperature and high pressure, it seems the concretions surrounding the buried bones and afforded them some protection. If this calcite cement, and therefore the concretions formed before fossilisation, then information about groundwater quality where the bones were buried would be locked away in the calcite minerals themselves - specifically, isotopes of carbon and oxygen. 

​We tested the carbon and oxygen stable isotopic values of the calcite cement, and by comparing our results to what is ‘typical’ for fresh water and sea water, found that it formed in a brackish water environment. This wasn’t terribly surprising: the regional geology indicates that the Eromanga Sea was nearby Isisford at this time, but until now we hadn't known whether it affected the environment at Isisford or not. When we examined geological core logs from near Isisford, and compared it to the types of rocks we found at the site, we concluded that these animals were buried in a river delta that flowed into the sea, with fresh river water mixing with salty ocean water. Unfortunately, there aren’t large exposures of Winton Formation at the site that would allow for typical facies analysis, but we worked with the material we had and came up with some pretty solid conclusions.

Our next question is: if these animal's carcasses were buried in a river delta, did they die there or were their bodies washed in from far away? Did they even live nearby at all? That is the subject of future papers that we will be publishing mid to late next year.

References
Syme, C., Welsh, K., Roberts, E., and Salisbury, S. 2016. Depositional environment of the Lower Cretaceous (upper Albian) Winton Formation at Isisford, central-western Queensland, inferred from sandstone concretions. Journal of Sedimentary Research, 86: 1067-1082. DOI: 10.2110/jsr.2016.67

Let's compare the sizes of these two dinosaurs: a hummingbird versus a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth. T. rex was only, oh, about 2 million times heavier than a hummingbird! Just look at the variation the vertebrate bauplan can achieve, just within theropoda! Brilliant!

​The powerful bite of a crocodile can cut through flesh and bone. Their teeth puncture, scratch, scrape and crush the skeletons of their prey. They leave behind tooth marks etched into bone, taphonomic traces which have been identified in the fossil record, and can tell us about the feeding behaviours and morphologies of ancient crocodylians. Or so we thought.

A new study by Drumheller et al. (2016) found that crocodile bite marks on bones do not seem to differ between crocodiles young and old, or male and female, or long-snouted and short-snouted. They collected bones bitten by 21 species of modern crocodylians and studied the types of bite marks left on bones surfaces – whether they were pits, punctures, scores, or furrows, and whether these marks were bisected (with extra notches or scoring from serrated teeth) or hooked (marks that changed direction). They compared the types and shapes of these bite marks to the snout shape, size, sex, age, feeding behaviour (the famous ‘death roll’), and captive or wild status of each individual crocodylian that created them. They found no significant difference between the shape of the bite marks and the individual who made them – even for crocodylians of different ages, with different snout shapes, or different feeding behaviours!

However, they did determine that bisected bite marks – those showing extra notches or scoring – were indicative of the teeth of crown Crocodylia. And as bisected bite marks have been found on fossil bones, the culprits can be successfully identified as a crocodylian (or perhaps a non-crocodylian crocodyliform – that is, animals not related to modern crocodylians, but instead an ancient offshoot of crocodyliforms that are now extinct). But not every individual crocodylian creates bisected bite-marks every time they feed, depending on whether their teeth are freshly erupted and sharply serrated, or old and worn down.
​
So, it seems you might be able to identify a crown Crocodylian as the culprit of a bone bite-mark, but cannot predict its age, sex, snout shape, or which method it chose to dispatch of its prey.  

References
​
Drumheller, Stephanie K., and Brochu, Chris A. 2016. Phylogenetic taphonomy: a statistical and phylogenetic approach for exploring taphonomic patterns in the fossil record using crocodylians. PALAIOS, 31: 463-478. [Paywalled]