Gross Matters and much to learn!

Yet again it is the end of another month...time is flying by in my first few weeks in Philadelphia. All I seem to be doing is learning Gross Anatomy (again) with the Vet Students at Penn Vet School...this I am doing to a level of detail that I never thought possible! The muscles of the neck, forelimb, torso, pelvis and hindlimb were mostly recognizable to me, but I swear that mammals manage to fit a few more in than my friends the archosaurs whom I am more familiar with. Each dissection class has delved deeper and deeper into our rather large dog. My dissection colleagues, Art(Arthur), Regina, Rachel and Brandon are focused on the task of learning every flap, foramen, vein, artery, nerve, etc., with great enthusiasm. Given all, bar Brandon, will be practicing as vets at some point...I understand their enthusiasm for knowledge. However, Brandon and I are firmly from the land of paleontology, where the bodies we usually delve into are crunchy, but nonetheless, this first-year PhD student of Peter Dodson is head-first with the rest of the team into the dog....so much so, his eyes water on a daily basis (contact lenses and formaldehyde do not mix well)!

I'm contemplating whether or not I should add more images of our dissection to this blog? Any comments on a yay or nay on whether additional images of such a display of canine corpses would be welcome..please let me know. The above image shows the nerves running from the spinal cord of the neck down to the forearm (the brachial plexus). It is quite an education seeing your brachial plexus neatly dissected so you can follow the major trunk of nerves from the next to the arm and then see them disappear (innervate) the muscles. Quite splendid that such an elegant system has evolved in us vertebrates. As we dive into the cardiovascular system, things get even more colorful, courtesy of our double-injected dog, that has satisfyingly siliconed red arteries and blue veins. One might think the vascular network would be easy to follow with the color-coding, but as the major arteries and veins bifurcate, trifurcate and multiply at every turn and organ, I think again on this beautiful network that natural selection has finely honed to the ultimate bowl of spaghetti for us to make sense of.

Today as we worked back from the vast liver in our dog, that is as hard as a chunk of parmesan, we then delved into the stomach and intestinal tract. One can get dizzy tracking arteries and veins as they dive in and out of this visceral soup of organs. If I take one thing from these 'refresher' classes for myself, it is that I have a huge respect for those who teach and those who want to learn the ins and outs of vertebrate Gross Anatomy.

High-Performance Dinosaurs?

Once again I have been a tad lackadaisical on the blog front, mainly a function of marking exam re-sits and writing a chapter for a volume on high-performance computing and dinosaurs....yes, HPC meets Jurassic Park!

How on earth can that be, I hear you all say? Dinosaurs are often hailed as a scientific communication breakthrough, but is this really the case? Does the ‘and finally’ news story, usually based upon a recent publication, give credit to the years of painstaking work from discovery to final interpretation? The same can be said for many areas of science, where the object of the science becomes the story but not the science itself. This, in part, is the fault of both media and the scientists, given we must be more aware of how our science is translated into digestible chunks that can be understood by non-specialist audiences. Dinosaurs, however, are in a unique position (albeit a quite extinct one). These animals have the potential to unlock many new areas of science to the public, given they provide a unique vehicle to deliver often complex science. Whether it be particle physicists blasting fossils with high energy X-rays at a synchrotron (Bergmann et al 2010 in PNAS) or computational biologists making dinosaurs run in virtual environments (Sellers and Manning 2007 in the Proc. Roy. Soc. B), it is clear these extinct giants have a role to play in engaging thepublic with more than just old fossil bones.

But why the HPC and dinosaurs chapter? Well, in the past ten years the science of palaeontology has been reinventing itself, looking to new disciplines to solve very old questions. Now that palaeontology is such a diverse, interdisciplinary research area, it has successfully facilitated the communication of science. Interdisciplinary work with engineers, geneticists, computer scientists and many other disciplines provides avenues that might excite interest in what might be considered discrete areas of research. Indeed, computational palaeontology is a splendid example of how the digitisation of specimens and subsequent computational analyses are both eye-catching and easy to distribute though modern media. The chapter I've been writing with Dr Peter Falkingham presents some studies studies detailing the different ways in which communicating dinosaurs to the public can facilitate understanding of wider disciplines. The use of museum displays, science festivals, television, and visiting schools will be but a few examples we have explored, to illustrate the application of past life to presenting 21st Century science...all with a liberal dosing of High-Performance Computing!