In our interactions with the ecosystem we need a healthy dose of humility. Paleoecology can provide that humility. There are many organisms that have this survival thing down much better than we do. Let’s figure out how they do that. I was surprised by how […]

The other day I heard Darren Naish and John conway, of the excellent Tetrapod Zoology Podcast, stumble over the question of why Paleontology is important. This was apparently a spill over from a whole panel of experts stumbling over this question at the Pop Paleo […]

An understanding of the paleoecology can shed new light on our current political debate and open up new options for win/win solutions. In other words, my opinions about wolves will make everyone on all sides of the political spectrum angry. Before I do that, I […]

Words are so useful because they point to Truth. But if they don’t point to Truth, they point away from Truth. As such I think it is time that we ecologists have a sit down with the word “disturbance” and ask, ‘what have you done […]

Both Separate and Connected. But how? I love to beat up on taxonomists because they tend to be constitutionally opposite of me. I see taxonomists as the accountants of the biological sciences, obsessed with making up rules out of thin air and trying to make […]

Language is powerful tool for revealing truth. We evolved our ability to harness that. But for that same reason, it is more important for us to look out for ways that language conceals truth. Why do I casually mention this now in a blog about […]

You call this a mass extinction event? Ha. I’ll show you a mass extinction event. Maybe you by now you would guess that I would say something like that, since I don’t like to agree. But I also want to say that actually the mass […]

There is nothing new under the sun and the world is born fresh at every moment. Holding both of those ideas at once will help you grab the overarching thesis of this very long series, which is eating up a significant percentage of the history […]

First-hand knowledge is so much better than second-hand knowledge. In the world of the internet, we are awash in second and third-hand knowledge. As a culture, we are trying to make up for many thousands of years when new ideas were carried from village to […]

Just like meeting your friend’s parents helps you understand that friend, Sauropod dinosaurs can help us understand us to understand our own herbivore-maintained-ecosystems. But before we get into that I must reluctantly do the almanac section, where I tell you what happened here on the […]