This is one of those things I’ve always done, that I’ve never thought to ask if others did. When you’re putting together a talk, or making a complicated figure, do you storyboard it first with a pen or pencil? I usually do, and have done since I started way back when.

“And in conclusion, this new fossil/analysis shows that Lineageomorpha was more [here fill in the blank]: diverse morphologically varied widely distributed geographically widely distributed stratigraphically …than previously appreciated.“  Yes, congratulations, you’ve correctly identified that time moves forward linearly and that information accumulates.

I think we’ve all had enough of the Impact Factor as a way of measuring the quality of journals.

A student wrote to me to ask where I got the motivation to prep my anatomy lectures. Here’s what I sent back. What works for you?

First, a short personal backstory. Vicki’s and my extended families both live mostly in Oklahoma and Kansas, so they only get to see our son, London, at the holidays or at infrequent mid-year visits. Starting when London was five, every year I’ve made a photo book of his adventures through the year to give as Christmas presents to all of our relatives. These have also become cherished mementos for the three of us here in Cali.

Last night, Fiona and I got back from an exhausting but very satisfying weekend spent at TetZooCon 2018, the conference of the famous Tetrapod Zoology blog run by Darren Naish — the sleeping third partner here at SV-POW!. What made this particularly special is that Fiona was one of the speakers this time. She’s not a tetrapod zoologist, but a composer with a special interest in wildlife documentaries.

My wife Fiona is a musician and composer, and she’s giving a talk at this year’s TetZooCon on “Music for Wildlife Documentaries – A Composer’s Perspective”. (By the way, it looks like some tickets are still available: if you live near or in striking distance of London, you should definitely go! Get your tickets here.) With less than four weeks to go, she’s starting to get nervous — to feel that she doesn’t know enough about wildlife to talk to

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After my short post on what to leave out of a conference talk, here are few more positive thoughts on what to include , based on some of the SVPCA talks that really stayed with me. First, Graeme Lloyd’s talk in the macroevolution symposium did a great job of explaining very complex concepts well (different ways of mapping morphospace onto phylogeny). It was a necessarily difficult talk to follow, and I did get lost a few times.

I deliberately left a lot of things out of the poster I presented at SVPCA: an abstract (who needs repetition?), institutional logos (who cares?), references (no-one’s going to follow them up that couldn’t find what they need in other ways), headings (all the text was in figure captions) and generally as much text as I could omit without compromising clarity.