Measuring skull traits

I hadn’t done too much work during my trip in India. My aim was to start the measurements as soon as I arrived at the office. For this I needed to make sure I knew what traits I was going to record. So when I had some spare time in India, I refined the list of skull traits I had decided to measure. The big challenge was trying to understand where a certain measurement started and ended – e.g. the length of adductor muscle attachment on the mandible. To do this I had to read through the literature to see if there were any consistent points on the skull I could use to start and end my measurements. Unfortunately, I did not finish this during my time in India and had to carry on with it in Bristol.

Fortunately, this did not take up much of my time and I was able to get my supervisors up to date with my progress and start the measurements. This was a very tedious task. I was aiming to be done with the measurements by the end of the week but I soon found that was an underestimation. The trouble was that the skulls of anomodonts are not the same so the points of reference I was using for my measurements would sometimes be absent or not so clear. As a consequence, it took me a while to get used to recording the measurements. On average for each of the 148 species I had to measure 20 traits. Of course, some species had images that didn’t show a certain view of the skull or no specimen images at all. For these I had to miss out all or some of the measurements. Despite this it still took me a few days to get into a flow and in the end it I finished the measurements a week and a half later.

Coding

Finally we could start coding. I say ‘we’ because the coding required for the analysis was beyond my skillset. My supervisor, Suresh, was the man for this as he already had some coding from a prior project which we could use as a template for mine. Surprisingly, this was very exciting for me. I say surprisingly because coding is not one of my strengths but since I had Suresh to help me things were made much easier. And when the first morphospace diagrams loaded up the results were not disappointing. Before I could process the figures Armin and Suresh were going back and forth on what the figures could mean. I can’t pretend to know what they were discussing although I did get the general gist of what they were saying. To put it simply my results seemed to contradict Professor Benton’s hypothesis that the P-T extinction event created an anomodont bottleneck from which they never completely recovered. This thrilled my supervisors which I found quite funny because it reminded me of the reaction of when friends beat each other in a video game. In the end most palaeontologists do their job for the same reason someone may play a video game so perhaps such a reaction shouldn’t be surprising!

Dinosaur memes

This can be seen in simply what post-docs and PhD students talk about in their spare time. During this week, as part of the Benton lunch group we went to a nearby restaurant called Beerds where we ate some pizza. Most of the students there were involved in Palaeo. One, a published author named Vicky Coules was conducting research into Palaeoart. She has been blogging her experiences here. Therefore, a lot of the conversation was around how dinosaurs had been represented in the media. At certain points in this conversation, one student Steven Zhang started making statements as if he was quoting from something. The statements themselves weren’t strange but the manner in which he said them were peculiar. I looked at my supervisor Suresh and his expression was as though of a person who had heard a bad joke. He explained to me that Steven was repeating lines from the Walking with Dinosaur series. Although this was perhaps the nerdiest thing I had heard of (this coming from a big fan of the Walking with… series), I did find it funny. However this was only the start as Steven started showing everyone something on his phone which he clearly found hilarious. He showed it to me and low and behold there was something I never thought I would see. It was a ‘Walking with dinosaur…’ meme. In fact, it was a whole private facebook group dedicated to memeing the series. Again nerdy but funny and refreshing. I say refreshing because back at UCL I’m not friends with anyone that has the same fondness of the series as myself although I must say quoting lines from the series during lunch perhaps goes too far.

At the time of writing this I have joined the esteemed facebook group  and I can confirm the memes are as cringey and funny as they seemed when Steven showed them to me!

Increasing pressure

For the first time, things were getting quite stressful. Originally the plan was that I would be finished with the image collection by the start of the final week so I could complete the measurements before I going to India. However, I had only collected half of the images I needed to. This was not because I was being lazy but more so to do with how I naturally work. I usually take my time with my work and when the task was to sift through seemingly hundreds of papers to find on average 5-6 images per species it took longer than I expected. Moreover, overtime the names of the species and specimen number can change so a paper in 1920 of a species could be different to the present day.

An additional problem was with the mandible. Most of the traits I would measure were related to the mandible but while I was collecting the images there were quite a few specimens that did not have a mandible. Particularly, a dorsal view of the mandible which was needed in order to measure the extent of propaliny.

I had to accept that I would not get onto the measurements during the final week so I told my supervisors about the delay and expected them to be worried that I would not finish my project. But to my surprise they accepted it without a problem and Professor Benton was even able to extend my internship to the end of September meaning I would have a few extra weeks after coming back from my holiday. This did ease my tensions and I was able to solve my concerns about propaliny measurements by consulting with Professor Rayfield who said I could use lateral views of mandible instead.

Problems with some skull traits

Nevertheless, mentally it was getting tiring. Spending long hours in front of a computer screen searching for images was starting to take its toll but fortunately I was getting quicker at it. And finally by the end of the week I had finished with my image collection but looking at the type of images I had collected made me realise certain traits could be a problem to measure.

For example, I thought calculating the mechanical advantage would be difficult since I could not figure out what references in the skull I could use to make the measurements needed for the calculation. This meant that during my holiday I had to look at the literature and see if I could find any features in the skull that I could use as a reference for the beginning and end for the measurements. However, I had another five weeks to do that so I wasn’t too worried and was ready to go on my holiday.

The tedious part of the project

Finally I was able to meet my supervisor, Suresh, who had been in the US for the past few weeks.  Fortunately, he had done a similar project but on a wider group of vertebrates so he had gone through a lot of anomodont skulls hence I was able to ask him some questions on measurements.

Week 4 consisted mostly of me collecting images for the near 150 species  of anomodonts. This was a tedious task but I understood that this was all part of science. Since the task did not require deep thought, I was able to listen to a few audiobooks to help me get through the boredom.

Fortunately, there were also a few social events to keep me entertained. We had another tea and cakes social. This time more people showed up and I found out that I was the only intern being paid. One intern I met had come from Italy and was trying to find another place to stay. He had taken up a job at a Chinese restaurant to pay for his private accommodation. Realising how fortunate I was made me more determined to stay diligent with my project since I felt the boredom from the task was a small problem compared to the difficulties other interns were facing.

Benton Lunch group

In addition to the tea and cakes that week, on Thursday I was invited to the Benton lunch group. Although any graduate student could join, the group consisted mostly of Professor Benton and the students he was supervising. Even during our lunch most of the conversations were about Palaeontology but it was interesting to hear what the other students were up to. One student was being supervised by Dr Adrian Lister to do a project on Mammoths. Apart from that, a good portion of the conversation was akin to academic gossip where we talked about other Palaeontologists.

Bristol zoo

But overall the whole week was uneventful in terms of work. However, I still had the weekend to look forward to. It was my birthday on Saturday and my parents, from London, and I planned to go to Bristol zoo. If possible, I recommend going to the Zoo. Its the world’s oldest provincial zoo. Its has a few stand out features including the twilight zone where they had the aye aye which many other zoos don’t have. Although it was nice to see a few extant animals for a change, I had to get back to my airbnb on Sunday as there was still a lot more measurements to be done and only a week left to do them.

Feedback from my supervisors

Week three started off with a meeting with my three of my four supervisors – Armin, Professor Benton and Professor Emily Rayfield. My remaining supervisor was in the USA to do some work there so I would have to wait another week before I met him. Nevertheless, they all gave me feedback concerning the two tasks from last week. They were all quite pleased with the list of measurable cranial traits that I collected. On the other hand, I sensed that they wanted more testable hypotheses and to be honest I shared that sentiment as I felt I had not read enough. However, I assured them that I would continue my reading while I would be on holiday.

Having Professor Rayfield in the meeting was useful because she suggested something really useful. One of the hypotheses I had read suggested propaliny (also known as palinal motion), which is the horizontal movement of the lower jaw, could explain the success of anomodonts post the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Professor Rayfield suggested that I could measure the length of the articular glenoid in relation to the quadrate condyle to assess the presence of propaliny in each species and compare whether this was more or less abundant in the remaining genera after the mass extinction event.

This led to discussions on what kind of skull images I needed to collect for each species. We settled on dorsal, lateral, occipital, ventral and palatal views of the skull as well as lateral and dorsal views of the mandible. Of course the availability of such images vary between species as some are better preserved than others. Even among the ones that are well preserved some views of the skull may not have been photographed. To see what kind of images I could consistently collect over all the anomodont species, we agreed on a trial run where I would try and collect these images for one species of anomodont from each family. From this trial run, I would also be able to see what measurements I could consistently take from the images. For example, if mandibles were not well preserved in anomodonts then I would have to discount any measurements to do with mandibles.

Increasing BME academics

Professor Benton also wanted me to look over a proposal he had written to asking for more funding for the BME diversity internship. Many internships in the past encouraged students to pursue Masters and PhDs so the idea was if Bristol could have a better funded BME internship with accommodation then BME diversity could be increased in academia. This speaks to the larger problem of BME diversity among academia as black professors only make up 5% of the 19000 professors in the UK. In the previous week, we had a meeting with two members from the student inclusion team on this proposal. Initially, we were looking for Bristol to provide accommodation for interns but to our surprise they had much greater aspirations of securing funding for these internships. They said that there is a real desire for such programs in Bristol so I have hope in the future this funding could be secured.

By this time, Professor Benton had set me up with my own blog. So I started thinking about what I wanted to write about. Obviously, I would write about my experience of the internship but I also wanted to make it easier for students in the future so I decided to also include some advice regarding the application, interview and the whole process leading up to the start of the internship. And thus the Bristol diversity Palaeobiology blog began!

The first real tasks

By the end of week one I was much more familiar with the literature and after a meeting with Professor Benton and Armin we had decided on two tasks for me to pursue for the next ten days.

The first task required me to read through a lot of literature to pick out testable hypotheses. It did take a while to cut through the jargon but I was able to learn about some interesting ideas.  The task also gave me an insight into how the field has changed. A lot of the classic literature contained many hypotheses but not much evidence to back it up. However, nowadays most of the current literature is more focused as these hypotheses can be tested with the advancement of bio mechanics, modelling etc .

The second task of listing all the skull traits that could be measured was much easier. I was given a handful of supplementary material from papers on other studies focused on skull morphology. They listed the skull traits that they measured with illustrations.

Not all computer work

I thought that this was the start of me spending long hours behind a computer with little human contact. In some ways it was but there was also a bit more variety during the week. Since I was the first student to do this internship, Professor Benton and Dr Vanessa Luk, who helped organise the internship, wanted me to blog my experiences like other students have done and give my input into how this internship could be made better in the future. We had a meeting on Wednesday where I gave some ideas on how the internship could be promoted. I thought they could make use of social media more for advertising and suggested next time they email colleagues from other universities so they could forward this opportunity to their students.

The next day I was invited by Professor Benton to have some tea and cakes at a nearby cafe where I would meet geologist Claudia Hildebrandt and some of the other interns. Unfortunately, only one other intern and Ms Hildebrandt could join us. On the bright side, it meant that we had more time to get to know each other and that’s what happened. We started off by explaining what our projects were about and weirdly somehow this led to us in the end speaking about homeopathy. Predictably, everyone there was quite hostile to it which was quite awkward for me since most of my family believe it works. Although I would not call myself a proponent of homeopathy, homeopathic medicine has always worked for me on the few occasions I’ve tried it. I mentioned this feeling that it would be dishonest of me not to and to my surprise Professor Benton apologised to me in case he had caused offence! Of course, I told him that was not necessary. Despite this, it was a nice chat that gave me a much needed rest.

By the end of the second week I had finished the tasks that were set for me. Another progress meeting was organised for the following Monday. Emotionally, I was feeling quite satisfied with the second week as I had completed the tasks set and I felt I was getting to know my supervisors better. But, it had been an exhausting week I was looking forward to a quiet weekend.

Meeting my supervisors

Heading into my first week of the internship I was both nervous and excited. Excited to at least have the opportunity to engage with the experts in the field and hopefully develop a good relationship with them. In my previous two years at university, I always felt that the academics were distant and not very approachable. This was largely to do with the fact that lectures were in large groups and made up the majority of my course. This was not conducive to much interaction between students and lecturers. On the other hand, I was nervous because I had doubts about how I would compare with my expert colleagues. Would I be able to hold a conversation with them? Would I find the terminology they use to be too confusing?

Fortunately, just like when I had my interview, Professor Benton’s jovial character was on hand to put me at ease. I met him at the Wills Memorial building at 9:00 am to go over some formalities. We then went to the Life sciences building where I was introduced to one of my supervisors Armin Elsler who was doing his postdoc. For the next few hours, Armin helped me log in and patiently gave a rough outline of the project by the end of which I had a much clearer understanding of what I had to do.

Afterwards, we had lunch together at a cafe nearby where we got to know each other. I asked him about how he decided he wanted to go into palaeontology and even some more personal questions about what his parents thought about his decision. Although my parents are and always have been very supportive of what I do, I knew they had reservations about me hoping to have a career in the life sciences – something which may not pay well.

Getting stuck into the literature

The rest of the week consisted of me getting used to the extensive literature on anomodonts which was kindly was provided to me by Armin. It was difficult to start because for the last three weeks I did little work and reading scientific literature can be quite dry. In addition to this, I was suffering from a terrible bout of hayfever which meant on the first day I left early after lunch and took the second day off.

To be honest, I did not help myself by going on a full day hike in Wendover at the end of the week with some friends. Nevertheless, being able to freely do work that I found interesting and end it with an outdoors adventure made the perfect start to the internship.

Choosing my own project

One of the most striking parts of this internship was the opportunity interns had to conduct a project of their interest. Initially, I was not too keen on the idea to propose a project as I did not think I had enough knowledge around the Permian-Triassic mass extinction but when I found out we would have to propose a project idea I went to my favourite YouTube channel on palaeontology TREY The Explainer to learn more about the subject.

I soon found a video on the most prominent findings in paleontology from 2018. Among the many discoveries that the video talked about, one was about a huge Dicynodont that was found in Poland. The most interesting part was the background information the video gave on Dicynodonts. Anomodonts (dicynodonts and relatives) were dominant herbivores in the Late Permian and Middle Triassic, with some 100 species, and they passed through a major bottleneck across the Permian-Triassic boundary, when abundance and diversity plummeted. Nevertheless, they became the most dominant land animal in the Early Triassic making up around 90% of the terrestrial vertebrates.

I brought this up to my supervisor, Professor Benton, and we began discussing ideas surrounding this topic on the day of my interview. These discussions continued via email after I was accepted for the internship and it was settled that I would focus on looking at the feeding mechanisms of Anomodonts before and after the mass extinction.

Why palaeontology? 

Going into my first week of the internship I was excited to get started. One of the reasons I enjoy palaeontology is that, to me, the palaeontologist is akin to a detective- someone who has to look for clues to reconstruct the past. The only difference is that the palaeontologist has to reconstruct something much further back in time. Hence, it could be said that the palaeontologists working on the P-T mass extinction are detectives working on the biggest murder mystery known to man. And now for a few months, I was going to be among those detectives!