There and Back Again...and again

Dinosaur Gallery, MfN, featuring Giraffatitan,

Apatosaurus, Dicraeosaurus and Archaeopteryx

One of the many benefits of studying animal osteology is that I get to travel to some pretty awesome places. Okay, so not fieldwork in the Bahamas or South Africa, like some of my colleagues in the lab, but museums can be awesome too! One of the largest collections in western Europe can be found at the world famous  Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) in Berlin, Germany. The MfN houses, among other things, the tallest mounted skeleton in the world - a Giraffatitan brancai - along with the famous 'Berlin Specimen' of the ancient bird Archaeopteryx. Less well known are the extensive mammalian, avian and alcohol-preserved collections. For my part, the fossil and extant mammal collections house a broad range of material from both living and extinct perissodactyls.

For my first visit to the collections I was accompanied by my girlfriend and on-the-day assistant Eleni, who made my job of finding and identifying which spevimens were good to use SOOO much easier! Our supervisor for the extant equids and tapirs collection was Mrs. Christiane Funk - collections manager for mammals at the MfN. With the combined forces of the three of us, we managed to log all the tapir and equid specimens in less than four hours...which by my standards is pretty speedy! Subsequent visits involved some pretty heavy lifting of suitcases full of bones, sweaty-nerding out in the fossil collections and several traipses through the Zoological Gardens, all of which were very enjoyable! I have also become intimately familiar with the new tram system, watched the road outside the museum take on a new shape every time I visit, and on the odd occasion lost my passport, hurling my holiday plans into turmoil! (I have a new one now, thankfully!)

My interest in the MfN collections are three-fold: first and foremost, I hope to use the described tapir specimens from the mammal collection to supplement the specimens we have already scanned from institutions in Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Austria. The acquisition of multiple specimens is essential to attain and account for as much variation in the bones as possible.

Secondly, I plan to use three unidentified tapir specimens to test whether geometric morphometrics can be used to distinguish tapir specimens at the species level. This project is in combination with colleagues at the KMDA, Antwerp, who will be testing the specimens using molecular markers from bone cores. The results of this study will hopefully enable museum collections to utilise a 'morphometric toolbox' for the positive identification of tapir specimens with no species denomination or locality information - essentially, making a useless specimen useful without invasive genetic sampling!

Comparison of Black Rhinoceros and the Giant Rhino Elasmotherium 
fischeri (based on MB.Ma. 26313). The Giant Rhino made a screen 
appearance on Nigel  Marven's Prehistoric Park on ITV (bottom right)

Lastly, we currently have a masters project looking into the morphological variation of the third metacarpal - an exemplar bone for many analyses on equids. To place this variation in a phylogenetic context, specimens from the fossil mammal collection have been loaned to us by Collections Manager Mr. Thomas Schossleitner and renowned vertebrate palaeontologist Dr. Oliver Rahut. Specimens have included equids from the Plio/Pleistocene, tridactyl hipparionine equids from the Pliocene, and a wide range of rhinoceroses ranging from the Miocene to the late Pleistocene (including the Giant Rhinoceros, Elasmotherium). To compliment these crown groups, we have also been granted specimens of brontotheres/titanotheres and the small, enigmatic palaeotheres; both these groups come from the Eocene epoch, over 40 million years ago!

Dice playing in a zebra's graveyard...

...and gazing at a long lost cousin

All in all, my yo-yo-ing to Berlin and back has been very fulfilling. Aside from learning how painful Eurolines coaches can be, I have had the opportunity to visit behind the scenes of one of the greatest museums of natural history in Europe, possibly the world. I would like to extend my thanks to all the staff at the Museum für Naturkunde, especially Christiane and Thomas, for their patient hospitality and for allowing me access to specimens that will prove invaluable to the continuation of my project. I always enjoy visiting, and I look forward to doing so again in the near future. 

Thanks to all for reading - stay tuned for my next research adventure! Ciao for now and guten tag!

A GMM Phylogeny of Wine - ants, plants and biology bants in Pierola, Barcelona

So, quick spoiler, I wrote this a while back, so apologies for the peculiar structure of the report - I hope you still like it!

So I find myself once more in the somewhat familiar surroundings of Zaventam airport, Brussels. Destination: Barcelona - 3rd time in under a year, lucky sod that I am! This time I do not travel alone - as Batman had Robin, Laurel had Hardy, and George W Bush had a decorative pot plant, my informative and plucky young sidekick for this tour to El Hostalets de Pierola in the absence of Zebo was Masters student Hester Hanegraef. Hester will be studying in the same lab on the same material as I, in a slightly less rigorous nature, and so this was a perfect opportunity for her and I to learn more about the techniques we can use on our specimens to test evolutionary hypotheses and, more importantly, paella-eating ability. We were joined in secret by my new mini-mascot, Dice. He will crop up throughout my PhD, so keep an eye out!

The course is organised by Dr. Sole Estaban as part of Transmitting Science, a company that has been established to provide detailed scientific experience and expertise in a wide variety of fields ranging from fundamentals of biomechanics to illustrative drawing. This was my second course, and focused on the use of Geometric Morphometrics in Phylogeny ('family tree') and the various ways that phylogenetic methods could be implemented to extract biological meaning from shape data. The course was run by Prof. Chris Klingenburg (University of Manchester), a renowned name in the field of morphometrics, whose intuitive knowledge of the program MorphoJ would be invaluable to us lesser mortals as we struggle with making sense of our data. Mind you, he should know all about it, he wrote the program...

School time at Pierola. Prof. Chris Klingenburg walking us through the processes with MorphoJ. Mini-mascot Dice the Diceros watches on as I manipulate a rhinoceros scapula on Landmark Editor. 

Overall, I must say that the course was a resounding success. With a low attendance (n=9) this gave everyone a great opportunity to interact with all other participants during the workshop, and with Chris whenever anything went drastically wrong! With attendees from Brazil, USA,  UK, South Africa and Northern Europe, this course was a testament to the success of the Transmitting Science franchise. It must be said that I wrote a lot down without necessarily always understanding every bit of it, but the knowledge I gained from the analyses I ran has set me up with brand new ideas for where my project can go. So if anyone has a repository of fossil horse feet they fancy lending me for purely scientific purposes, that would be swell!

As always, the academic and extra-curricular activities are equally as important during a course such as this. Aside from a wealth of morphometric and phylogenetic knowledge, this week we discovered:

1. When you have the worlds largest repository of leaves for an endemic group of plants, morphometrics is the way to keep masters students busy...

2. Music is wine, barriers are burritos, p-values mean nothing and everything, weasels are dimorphic, the "secret stash" is basically in the kitchen, icecream is a sandwich, PhD students look at pictures not numbers, gravity always wins, and at the end of the day garlic makes everything better...

3. Fleas bite you in straight lines. Mosquitos dont give a s**t. Ants LOVE aioli, and favour apple and butifarra in equal measure (suggesting that, with 95% certainty and a p-value of <0.05, the ants are from Catalonia)...

4. Vegetarianism is rife, as long as the parameters for being a vegetarian include: "will eat fish"...

Fantastic vineyard visit on the way back to Barcelona at the end of the course. Beautiful weather and top quality grape-juice!

It must be said I had another really rewarding experience in Barcelona, coupled with some delightful wine-tasting in the Catalan hills, and look forward to returning some day soon. My thanks extend to Chris, Sole and all the Transmitting Science staff, and special thanks to the Catalan people for making us so welcome.