Time does fly. I still have very clear memories of various science and biology classes at school, many of my lectures at university, my Masters and my PhD work, and plenty of other formative experiences that led me into my career. But arguably I really became a ‘proper’ scientist when I published my first peer-reviewed paper, back in 2005. As such, this year marks the 20^th anniversary of my first foray into being a published academic. As an aside, I’d always has in my head that my first paper came out in May of that year, which is why this post is coming now, but a recent check shows it has a January date on it, so I’m clearly misremembering.

Over the years, this blog has become less and less about palaeontology and dinosaurs in general and moved more and more into covering bits of my research and new papers. This really is a consequence of having ever less time to keep going on here, with more and more commitments in my academic job and home life, as well as my shift into writing books and doing the podcast among other things. With less time for blogging, but not wanting this space to fade away, it’s rather inevitable that I can only really rouse myself occasionally and for the things that most interest me and of course that tends to be when I have a paper out. This post of course rather further exaggerates this pattern, but I hope that after well over 15 years of providing information on this platform, my slow slide into self-indulgence will be tolerated.

Twenty years is a not insignificant milestone, so I thought I’d sit down and, with no real planning, put down a few thoughts about my career in terms of research. I fill focus on that side of things and so despite the books and videos and talks, and my various jobs and research trips, that have taken me around a good part of the world, my friends and collaborators, I did want to focus on my papers. Having now published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and chapters in books and compilations (as well as various comments, replies, corrections, extended abstracts and the like), I do have a decent set to look back on.

Naturally things have changed over the years, and I’ve shifted my focus and interest at various times, or picked up the thread of projects that have come my way and opportunities grasped. I’ve put out papers on subjects as diverse as soft-tissue preservation, trackways, science communication, and even managed to get some work done on extant lineages (not to mention one paper on volcanoes), but there have been a few mainstays in my work that I’d like to focus on.

My very first papers were on Cope’s Rule and the evolution of large size, especially in dinosaurs. Although this is something I’ve not looked at anything like as much in recent years, this was the starting point of my academic publishing (based on my Masters dissertation) and the sheer size of dinosaurs has always been an interest. More recently though, I’ve been less concerned with what was actually going on evolutionarily, and what this means for the animals themselves and how we use that information. That’s led into works on things like the problem of dinosaur tails and what that means for saying how big they were, and the maximum possible sizes of dinosaurs, as well as work on their growth. After all, there’s not much point comparing one of the largest members of species A with a very small member of species B and claiming that A is bigger. So, while this is very much not my primary interest these days, and most of my work in this area was in a flurry at the start of my career, as recently as last year I had a paper out exploring some of these issues, so it remains on my mind. It’s obviously a longstanding area of research in general and while my contributions might be relatively minor, it’s been an important part of my career.

Fairly close behind was the work that led to my first naming of a species, the rhynchosaur Fodonyx. Somewhat ironically, my Masters was in taxonomy but I ended up doing a project on dinosaur size, and then didn’t end up naming a species until my PhD (on macroevolutionary patterns) was finishing up. Still, alpha taxonomy (naming new things and sorting out the identity of specimens) is a field I trained in and has been a part of my work ever since. In total, I’ve now named nearly two dozen dinosaurs, pterosaurs and rhynchosaurs with various authors over the years. While it’s hardly the main thing that I do, I’ve continued to work in this area and won’t stop anytime soon. I regard this work as foundational to the biological sciences – how much confidence can we have in our work if we don’t know what things are? Analysing the evolution of clade but unknowingly including things that are not part of it, or are juveniles or that splits males and females apart etc., will always impact the results and so work starts with the correct identification of specimens. While something like 20 species (and a few other revisions) is a bit of a drop in the ocean in Mesozoic archosauromorph terms, and things like naming taxa will always be contentious or cause disagreements, I’d like to think that I’ve done more good than harm sorting out various bits and adding some names to the pantheon of taxonomy.

More significantly, the main focus of my work for many years now has been on dinosaur ecology and behaviour (while keeping my hand in on the pterosaurs where I can). That obviously covers quite a range of subjects (as I think my recent book shows) and I’ve obviously poked around the edges of a fair few issues (what, if anything, was Spinosaurus doing in water?) but one of the main one has been the diet of dinosaurs, specifically the carnivores. I’ve published quite a series of papers over the years on various key specimens showing things like bite traces, consumed bones and the like, as well as much bigger synthesis papers and reviews, trying to use a lot of datapoints to build up a picture of what theropods were doing. I’ve tried to work around some of the problematic language (‘predator-prey’) and inconsistencies in interpreting predation vs scavenging in these, but my biggest contribution I think, has been to push the idea that theropods primarily targeted non-adult prey. It’s almost a cliché that predators target the old, sick and especially young, but the assumption always seemed to be that the largest theropods tackled the largest prey species. In general, this is probably true, but members of big species don’t start big and that’s where they’re vulnerable. Bringing in studies from all kinds of areas on living groups really helped build a picture of what was common or even normal behaviour for carnivores, and I think I’ve had a decent role in reforming some of our ideas about this subject.

The one area where I think I can claim to have had a truly leading role is in the study of socio-sexual selection and communication. Across a dozen or so papers, I have really pushed and explored the implications of sexual selection, crest and ornament development and what it means for issues like sexual dimorphism, signalling, reproductive strategies, and how we work with this in the fossil record. While the ideas are hardly new to biology, I think I’ve been largely responsible for bringing mutual sexual selection and the issues of monomorphism into dinosaur research and pushing aside problematic explanations like species recognition. We’ve even been able to test some of these ideas (no mean feat with the available data) with, for example, my papers on gharial snouts, dinosaur growth trajectories, and ceratopsian distribution. I think it’s my most important contribution to our understanding of ancient animals and it’s been influential gaining some real traction in the literature. I just wish we had some better datasets to apply these ideas to than just Protoceratops!

I think that’s a decent summary of my publications over the last 20 years. Rereading this, the pterosaurs don’t get much of a look in, despite the fact that I started out on them, and they make up perhaps 30 or even 40% of my papers. That said, they have filtered into every one of these areas, as I’ve named multiple species, looked at their growth and giant individuals, and their head crests, and stomach contents (as well as finding them on the menu of dinosaurs and sharks). In fact, I’m on a bit of a run on pterosaurs at the moment, so there’s plenty more to come on them in the next year or so.

Anyway, I do hope this wasn’t all too self-indulgent and was still an interesting read for anyone who has made it this far. On such an anniversary, a bit of self-reflective noodling seems appropriate, and a bit of self-congratulations warranted. Naturally, this is not the end of my work (I’ve got a bunch of papers in various stages of completion right now, including one that’s been accepted and due out very soon), so I can hopefully continue to develop these themes further.

Obviously, I’ve not done this alone. In addition to all manner of colleagues, mentors, curators and coauthors, even the handful of papers on which I am the sole author relied on access to specimens and would be the result of discussions with colleagues and the help of referees and editors. So, to them I extend my thanks for all of the time and efforts they have committed over the years. I only hope they will continue to provide their friendship and support for many more. Here’s looking forwards to another 20 years of publications.