Welcome!

Today is the first day of writing this blog. I attended a graduate student workshop this morning about what makes a Phd student successful. What I got out of it, which may not be what they thought I would get out of it,  is the following:

A. Figure out why you are doing a Phd.
B. What ever the answer to A, figure out how to get excited about your phd, and follow through on that
C. Write every day about/for your Phd.
D. Go surfing

Well, maybe D isn't exactly what I need, though now that I mention it,  would really love to learn how to surf and it is getting into summer...

A and B I am going to need some help with, (and D...) But C is something I can start today.

So let me introduce myself, academically.

After completing my undergraduate studies I commenced an honours research project on scarce pterosaur material form central-western Queensland. After an extended wrestling match with pterosaur phylogenetics and the paucity of description of non-cranial elements, my supervisor, Steve Salisbury, and I prevailed with a paper in the coveted Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology.

Fletcher, T. and Salisbury, S. W. 2010. New pterosaur fossils from the Early Cretaceous (Albian) of Queensland, Australia.  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 30(6), 1747–1759.

You can find the link to the Pdf here is you are keen.

During the two years following my honours I traveled to Germany to present this work at the Munich Flugsaurier in honour of Peter Wellnhofer, completed a Graduate certificate in Communication, science communication, and another in Arts, philosophy of science, and spent about 20 hours a week volunteering as an acid preparator, undergraduate volunteer supervisor and unofficial lab manager.

During one of my trips out west on field work with the lab, I was struck by the large fossilised logs intertwining between the semi-articulated vertebrate we were unearthing.  It is uncommon for plant and vertebrate fossils to be preserved together and the possibilities of a project combing the two started circulating.  So the seed of my Phd was planted.

Over time the scope and title of my phd have changed and it is now something like: Biological proxies for palaeoclimate: A case study from the mid-Cretaceous Winton Formation (Aptian-Albian), central-Western Queensland.

In the following posts I expect I will give you a bit of background on each of the methods I am using, or have tried to use including: Leaf Margin Analysis, Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program, Leaf Area Analysis, Bioclimatic Analysis, Wood Indices correlation, crocodile bone histology (modern and ancient) and dinosaur bone histology. I may expound on my adventures in concurrent enrollment as I embark on an online university course in computational statistics. I will probably give some reviews on the conference I recently attended and those coming up soon. And hopefully, I will get in the habit of writing.

Welcome to my blog.