It has preyed heavily on my mind over the last year - every time a colleague or a student has asked me about my PhD I have felt like more and more of a fraud. Because the truth is, I have done absolutely no work save for the reading of a few papers here and there. It seems almost every waking hour has been, since August 2009, devoted to the service of my students, with a slight detour to do the part-time teaching qualification expected of me. So entirely have I engrossed myself in my students' welfare and education that I spent some of my holiday last week (my wedding anniversary in fact) writing a desperately-needed reference for a needy teenager.

My students and some of my friends are aware that Paul was made redundant in February of this year. This has been particularly devastating all round, along with other aspects of my life that are too personal to share. I had promised myself that I would use the holidays for fieldwork and research, but half-terms and holidays were eaten into with revision sessions and course planning. I didn't resent this, by any means, but the fact remains that I did not have holidays available as planned. A retired colleague told me yesterday that anyone who does find themselves with full holidays as a teacher probably teaches in a private school!

So it has been with a heavy heart that I, prompted by my supervisors, have withdrawn from the MPhil/PhD programme at Birkbeck, University of London. I have exhausted all options for leaves of absence. There will be no returning to any PhD programme. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to quit one PhD may be regarded as a misfortune; to quit both looks like carelessness.


I now have to figure out where I stand in the vertebrate palaeontology community. There are some at SVP who regard me as a little kid trying to sit at the grown-ups' table, to be ignored and talked over. I anticipate that these will continue to do so, but at least now they have reason to ignore me. There are plenty of members of SVP who do not think that anyone outside of an academic or museum institution deserves to be at SVP, and that non-professionals constitute everything that is wrong with the community. And there will be the ones who will want to hang out as though nothing has happened.

I just hope I am able to work out who is who before I upset myself.

In and around this, I had to work out what to do with my blog. I probably cannot get away with calling myself the Ethical Palaeontologist anymore, as while I still think I am the former, I am not really the latter. So this blog will no longer be updated. In and around the enormous fallout from "Pepsigate" on Scienceblogs, I imagine this will pass unnoticed, but I hope that by submitting it to the August Scientiae carnival it will be picked up - after all, it is about reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the next.

What does the future bring? Mixed with the sadness of leaving my PhD programme is the joy of having been awarded a full-time position lecturing biology at the college I have been teaching at since this time last year. My parents are bursting with pride. My husband confesses to being "hot for teacher". My students think I'm pretty damn good too, although I'm not sure that newly-discovered gem from one of my A2s is something I should necessarily put down on my CV.

To complement the change of scene, you can find me and my blog over at Stages Of Succession. Any of my incoming A2 Biology students who have already finished their leaf margin analysis of the local parks can now go away and research what succession is.

Edit: Oh yes, you'll need to update your feeds too... The new feed is .

Unless you have have been in a coma for three months or you rely on getting all your world news from Fox, you will know that we in Blighty have a new party (parties?) in power and a new prime minister. With this, we also have a new science minister, David Willetts MP. He made his first big speech last Friday, in which he said:

"The two best ways of getting young people into science are space and dinosaurs. So that's what I intend to focus on."

Really, David? Really? You are currently battling against a tide of derision and mistrust of scientists spearheaded by the tabloid newspapers. Your predecessors brought in tuition fees and top-up fees that are putting bright students off going to university. The top universities for science in the country are contemplating even higher fees. There are bugger all jobs for scientists in the UK. And a depressingly large number of people still believe in astrology, homeopathy, psychics and detox products. And getting kids more into dinosaurs and space is the way to heal the festering wound that is Britain's disdain for science and scientists?


Don't get me wrong. I bloody love dinosaurs. I am happy as the proverbial pig when I'm in dinosaur country out in the western USA, or visiting a museum, or having them indelibly inked onto my body. But it's rather a western thing, or, dare I say, rather a white thing. I teach a lot of refugees and immigrants in my GCSE classes - very few of them know what dinosaurs are. Yet many of these young people will make excellent scientists, and they need to be encouraged too. They are unlikely to find dinosaurs inspiring.

I think space is pretty awesome too. Ten years ago I would have said you would be hard pressed to find a child who was not either dino-crazy, space-crazy or both. I don't see that anymore. Sure, I took my National Diploma students to the Science Museum a few weeks ago, and the young men in my group would have happily spent all day looking at the various rockets, probes and landers in the space gallery.

Do they want to be astronauts now? No. One of my students said during the previous term that she wanted to be the first Muslim woman in space, until she found out that someone has beaten her to it. I have directed her to my friend Brian Shiro's website, Astronaut For Hire, where she has been reading about some of the amazing projects he has participated in, and I hope I can encourage her to follow her dreams.

But here's the rub - no teacher would say it is sufficient to just expose students to space and dinosaurs. It is not enough to get students to say "Wow - that's cool!" unless they then follow that with "I could do that!". It's all about helping children realise that science is something that people like them do. It's about showing them that scientists are not all old, bald men in white coats, as the Fermilab project "Drawings Of Scientists" has shown.

I have some modest suggestions (you knew I would, right?).

1. Talk to students about stereotypes of scientists - the images we see in the media, what their own thoughts are.
   
2. Get them interacting with real scientists: take them on behind-the-scenes visits to scientific laboratories, or get them involved in the superb I'm A Scientist event. Show scientists in a good light, and for the love of Flying Spaghetti Monster STOP CALLING THEM BOFFINS!
   
3. Take every opportunity to help them find out about scientists from their background and culture. Yesterday was the birthday of George Washington Carver (despite the Wikipedia suggestion to the contrary). My students have learnt about Neil deGrasse Tyson, Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, Rosalind Franklin, Henrietta Lacks, Stephen Hawking, and other scientists or people involved in science, who are not from privileged white male backgrounds (I'm always looking for more inspirational stories of minority scientists, so please drop me a line if you have more to add).
   
4. Let students touch science. When covering plant tropisms, all my A2 students (over 18 years old) declared that plants were the Most Boring Things Ever. Which is when I presented them with a Mimosa pudica and changed their minds. They've cut up sheep's hearts, climbed trees, stroked newts and articulated skeletons.
   
5. Remember that there are all sorts of science-based careers. My students aspire to study medicine, dentistry, radiography, physiotherapy, sports science, psychology, biochemistry, forensic science, biomedical studies, engineering, chemistry, ecology, palaeobiology and genetics. I doubt many of them were inspired by space or dinosaurs (well, except the palaeobiology student, obviously).

In the end, what David Willetts said about dinosaurs and space is at best, simplistic and naïve, and at worst, downright patronising to the students. Can't we encourage a curiosity in the natural world, the rewarding of intellectual endeavour and the restoration of science to its rightful place as a desirable profession?

There's a fantastically bad joke, most famously featured in "Jurassic Park", and it goes like this:

Q: What do you call a one-eyed dinosaur?
A: Do-you-think-he-saurus!

Nearest and dearest will know that, at the start of May, we lost our other little leopard gecko, Hastur The Unspeakable. We discovered that both she and Mokele had in all likelihood had cryptosporidiosis, which is pretty much a terminal condition. Their deaths opened up a big hole in our lives, and we knew we had to get another gecko soon. Via the Reptile Forums UK rehoming page, we found a little girl.

She was perfectly healthy except that she was missing one eye. As the rescuers didn't know if this was congenital or not, they were only prepared to rehome her to owners who wanted a pet rather than a breeder. Which is where we came in.


This is Dooya, short for Dooya Thinkshesaurus. We think she's about two years old, and she's fighting fit (although she does have a pretty decent pinworm infection right now). In contrast to her predecessors, she is packing in the food. She's putting on about 2g a week, and has plenty of junk in the trunk.


She has worked out what feeding time looks like, and watches Paul as he delves in the giant sack-o-locusts we ordered from Pets Or Meat, tracking the tongs. She licks her lips very frequently, helping to pass chemicals to her Jacobson's organ. She yawns, which is both adorable and annoying, as it's perfectly possible for us to catch the yawn from her, but she's immune to catching it back from us. And today she got a little attack of hiccups - no mean feat for an animal that I didn't think had a diaphragm!


Term ended on Friday, so blogging may resume more frequently. I have a few things to talk about, so it might be sooner rather than later. But now it's time for more gecko love.

When I was an undergraduate, there was one subject that could fill me with dread (at least once I'd dropped all the hard rock geology and left myself the option of working on nice, soft rock stuff). It was micropalaeontology. I despised the practicals. The only thing that made spending two hours picking those pissy little foraminifera (forams) up with a moistened paintbrush bearable was knowing that the next week I'd be able to watch them being crushed up and shoved through a mass spectrometer. Result.


It took some time for their significance to sink in. But to put it very simply, forams in particular are very good at telling us about the environment in which they were living. The proportions of ¹³C and ¹²C, and the proportions of ¹⁸O and ¹⁶O, which they absorb as they form their shells, are related to the temperature of the water at that time. You want to know what the deep ocean temperature was? You need to pick out species of benthic forams. What about the surface temperature? Find certain species of pelagic forams. It's okay, you can crush them up later in revenge. Some species only lived in shallow seas. Some species only lived below a certain depth.

Microfossils are essential if we are to understand past climates and environments and to react to how our climate is changing at the moment. And although it makes me sick up a bit to say it, microfossils are more important than dinosaurs in terms of the range of information obtained and their use to different geoscience disciplines. Sorry dinosaurs. You're still more awesome.

How do you tell the difference between them all? Buggered if I know. That's why there are micropalaeontologists. And they are ace. Not only because they can pick forams (and count the little buggers) for twelve-hour shifts if necessary, when I was bellyaching after half an hour of staring down the microscope, but because they can look at two seemingly identical blobs less than 1mm across and tell which one is Globigerina bulloides and which one is Globigerina glutinata...

 
Images from University of Southampton
So it is distressing to see that the Natural History Museum is closing its Micropalaeontology Division. It was announced just under a fortnight ago via the PaleoNet listserver. It's also troubling to see that the person who made the decision is Norm MacLeod, the Palaeontology Department Keeper, who is... a micropalaeontologist.

There is a . There is a petition (doing pretty well at 1069 signatures as of the point where I signed). Can widespread dismay across the community do anything to reverse the decision? Really, can any action do anything to reverse the decision? I'm hoping so, which is why I'm posting these links. I have, on a good day, over 250 subscribers. If you all kicked up a fuss, that would add a decent amount of weight to the campaign.

This arrived earlier in the week, accompanied by a £3 customs charge and an £8 swindlinghandling fee from Royal Mail. It is most awesome.

 
You can order them online from Mouthman. I ordered a large, which is a little big on me.

If only I didn't look like a complete wazzock wearing it then I could include this as part of my teaching wardrobe...

Paul's favourite pastime in the summer is hunting for slugs and snails after dark, dropping the slugs into the beer trap and pitching the snails overarm into the car park behind the house. I was sitting outside with a cup of tea while he went about his duties, when I heard "Oh my god! Julia, come here!". I went over to the steps down to the basement, and saw what his torch was illuminating:


This is one of a pair of common newts, Triturus vulgaris, which seem to have taken up residence in the garden. I'm a little puzzled, as I would have thought by now they were in full-on breeding season, and they're still very much terrestrial. But I do wonder if my tiny terracotta pot pond with its two plants (lizard's tail and horsetail) would make a suitable newt hatching ground!

I shall keep a look out, and have suggested that Paul stops collecting slugs from the steps, so the newts have plenty to eat. It means sacrificing my deciduous Magnolia leaves for the third year in a row, but worth it to see some vulnerable animals doing well in Jurassic Park.

The kids are starting to get scared about the exams. This is probably A Good Thing given that the GCSEs start this Friday. So here are some more nuggets of wisdom gleaned from the pre-exam scramble.

1. There is a mythical goal called "Finishing The Syllabus" that few if any teachers attain comfortably.
   
2. Even if you do manage to finish your syllabus the exam board will find a way to screw you over by putting the last module you covered first in the timetable so the poor kids have barely any time to revise it.
   
3. Students aren't very good at spotting trends, and will predict the next in the sequence A A A A A A A A A as D.
   
4. There will come a time when students just kind of give up on doing homework.
   
5. There will come a time when said students just start laughing when you mention the idea of homework.
   
6. Despite doing a Spearman's Rank Correlation on the grades acquired by the students versus the number of pieces of homework submitted, you will find no link and be forced to concede defeat.
   
7. I'm one of those teachers who has vowed never to let a student down or to be the limiting factor in their progression.
   
8. This means I'm spending a lot of time being let down by students.
   
9. We really really need to keep our comparative anatomy collection.
   
10. I'm getting a reputation as "that teacher who carries around animal skulls all the time".
    
11. I like that reputation.
    
12. Every class thinks they're the worst class I teach. Except the class that is actually the worst.
    
13. Using the Venganza pirates-versus-temperature correlation graph to make a point can result in a fascinating conversation with some Somali lads who are very proud of their nation's long tradition of piracy.
    
14. No student ever gets tired of watching birds of paradise doing their mating dances.
    
15. Your responsibilities are far from over when they've finished the course and left college.

I doubt any of my kids read the blog, but if they are, here is a message for them:

You know more than you think you do. You are capable of everything you set your heart on. Read the goddamn question before you answer it.

Good luck kiddlywinks!

Today I have felt like ass. In case you've been under a rock (or possibly only getting your international news from Fox), yesterday was the UK General Election. Paul and I stayed up last night until our constituency was called, just after 6am. I was in class lecturing at 9am. My students noticed that I was welded to my supermassive insulated coffee mug (thanks Usch - still one of the most useful presents I've had), and my colleagues noticed that I could benefit from about 20 hours of sleep.

I am bitterly disappointed. The Lib Dems did not manage to translate their popularity into votes, and because the First Past The Post system is ridiculous, the absolute votes do not translate into a representative number of seats. So nationally it's a tragedy. Locally, in my constituency, not only did Andrew Dakers come third to the Conservatives and the outgoing Labour MP, but the poor man lost his Council seat. For a representative who has campaigned tirelessly for local issues, this is a terrible blow. And finally, the Lib Dems' science champion Evan Harris has lost his seat too. A sad day for those of us who were buoyed up by the vastly superior science policies of the Liberal Democrats.

I'd put links in the above paragraphs, but I am too exhausted. I remember, back in 2004, being at SVP in Denver, flying in on Election Day - there was a party atmosphere and the largely Democratic-voting SVP attendees were rooting for Kerry-Edwards. The next day, with Dubya still in power, I saw broken men and women. Still in my mind is a conversation Paul and I had with Matt Lamanna, where he said he could not remember an time he had invested so much time, money and emotion in an election, and he was simply devastated. He echoed what most of his fellow countrymen at the conference felt. This morning Paul said "Now I understand how Matt felt".

It remains to be seen what solution is reached through this hung parliament. I'll reserve my comments on individual policies until I see who's in and who's out. I'm distressed by the reports that people were turned away from polling stations last night, and not least because there are claims that students were separated out from "real" residents and those residents given priority in the queues. A couple of my students today said they tried to register to vote but were never sent polling cards, and when they went to the polling station they were not on the electoral roll.

Tomorrow, Paul and I are going to our first protest, organised by the Take Back Parliament movement. Maybe we're too old for this protesting lark, but damnit we feel strongly about this. David Cameron got one thing right in his election campaign: We Can't Go On Like This.

Some 20-ish years ago, my husband was on holiday with his family in Blackpool. As a special treat, he and his brothers were taken to a restaurant that did ice cream floats. The over-enthusiastic waiter told them all that they could have any combination they liked - absolutely any ice cream and absolutely any fizzy drink. Sensible choices were made by the rest of Paul's family, such as vanilla ice cream and American cream soda, vanilla and cola, vanilla and lemonade.

And then Paul made his choice. This was going to be easy. He was going to have his most favourite flavour of ice cream and his most favourite flavour of fizzy drink. What could possibly go wrong?

"So young man, what flavour ice cream would you like?"
"Mint choc chip."
"Okay, and what flavour drink?"
"Lilt."
"..."

I'm not sure Lilt exists over in the USA, but it's pineapple flavoured. This should give you some idea of what was about to go down. Despite suggestions from his parents that this might not be the tasty yummy treat he was expecting, he was adamant - mint choc chip and Lilt.

The nervous waiter duly brought the float and Paul took a big gulp... And started crying like the big baby he was. Why do I tell you this? Because over the past few days I've seen a lot of adverts for this, and I can't help thinking that this might be a similar experience:


I like beer, I really do. The more I drink of it the more I like it. I really like tequila - in fact I love it. In theory it's a win-win situation, taking two foodstuffs I love and combining them (having had steak in a dark chocolate sauce I can vouch for the fact that sometimes it works), but in practice, I fear Desperados beer is just mint choc chip and Lilt.

As feared, a number of lecturers are stranded overseas at the moment. This, coupled with the college's network being down for most of the day due to building work, has meant a lot of babysitting of classes for me, coupled with very little in the way of resources other than a whiteboard and pen.

Which is a perfect opportunity to teach the kids about volcanoes, plate tectonics and global climate. Today, with my GCSE and BTEC classes, we covered:

• tectonic plates
  
• the mid-ocean ridges
  
• other types of plate boundaries
  
• why Iceland exists
  
• what the jet stream is
  
• how a jet engine works

What we didn't cover was how to a) spell and b) pronounce Eyjafjallajökull. Callan from Mountain Beltway linked to an awesome photo of the eruption:


It's incredibly exciting from an educational point of view to be able to show students geology in action. They understand why aeroplanes needed to be grounded, and by the end of the BTEC class one of my darlings said "Miss, I want to study geology" (although he may have been saying that so I didn't mark him as being 5 minutes late for class).

Incidentally, while classes have proceeded mostly as normal, at Birkbeck, one of the classes cancelled this week is - you've guessed it - "Volcanism Of The Solar System"...