Richard Butler

It may be connected to seeing the latest contribution by one of our favourite colleagues.

If a researcher chooses to publish all their papers in MDPI journals it’s pretty clear that they don’t care about research quality or the peer review process.

Ooo look it's me in February's The Week Junior!

Badenoch gives a borderline disgraceful performance at PMQs on Iran | John Crace At times like this you have to thank your lucky stars that the opposition leader is not in Downing Street

This is very good: “Keir may have been a disappointment as prime minister domestically. But it doesn’t bear thinking about the state we’d be in if Kemi or Farage were in Downing Street right now.”

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

I had a really interesting and inspiring day @unibirmingham.bsky.social 's Earth Heritage Network event. So nice to see friends and colleagues and hear about their work in this area. Thanks Kirsty, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and Faye for launching this initiative!

It’s less than half of me…

Cool, but I don’t understand the human mass on this figure. How many adult humans weigh 41.5 kg?

Just finished watching Mackenzie Crook’s new show Small Prophets. An utter, utter joy throughout, just like The Detectorists before it.

Was the solution to palaeo mysteries hidden right in front of our faces? High powered X-ray analyses of Silurian 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 fossils reveals cryptic 👁️ & 🦴 of early vertebrates, whilst new discoveries in Cretaceous 🇭🇺 find the missing European ceratopsians. Find out more in this week's new episode!

23. Squishy fishies and horned Hungarian dinosaurs: Fossils hidden in plain sight YouTube video by The Fossil Files Podcast

This week we cover Fossil Files' own papers,
1st by @fossilyarns.bsky.social & @fossilrob.bsky.social,
2nd by @tweetisaurus.bsky.social, @richardjbutler.bsky.social @stevebrusatte.bsky.social and others, out now on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts www.youtube.com/watch?v=RriR...

Really sad news. Hans worked on an incredible diversity of vertebrate groups but in particular made huge contributions to our understanding of the Triassic.

Finally, some sight of the elusive sun & a dry day. Spent it on the Stiperstones.

Been following this all through 2025. Think of the $$$ not spent by this may people. Some estimate $50 Billion. Probably a combination of people not wanting to come here & less disposable income for others.

‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, i...

Crazy story. I’m travelling to Canada twice this year. Under other circumstances both trips might have been to the US, but it’s difficult to see when I will next travel there. Canada is amazing though!

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Yes. I was paid £2.20/hour to work long shifts on a supermarket checkout, working just as hard as those older than me. Even in the late 90s that felt exploitative. Higher youth minimum wage today is surely a good thing.

Apart from Titanoboa obviously.

True.

He appears to be channelling Bruce Springsteen these days.

Surely there's some equally niche taxon you've been waiting your entire professional life for someone to describe Jason?

A new species of Spinosaurus is cool
& all that but what I’d really love to see Sereno describe is that Kayenta heterodontosaurid species first mentioned in a paper 41 years ago.

More terrible news for the embattled UK higher education sector.

How do I become a paleontologist? This is a revised and updated version of an old post of mine that’s now nearly 10 years old, so it seemed sensible to give it a polish and re-release it into the wild. So, what do you do to become …

I've decided to revise and update one of my most important and popular blogposts "How do I become a paleontologist?".

I still get asked this every few weeks so having a new version of this post to share is so useful to put people on track.

archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2026/02/17/h...

Universities: get ready for the new normal - LSE Higher Education Research funding is being restructured. Student lives have fundamentally changed. Yet universities continue planning for minor adjustments to a model that no longer exists. Huw Morris examines two str...

Pretty grim reading on the future for
UK academia: blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducat...

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Save your spot and start planning your IPC7 experience!

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Congrats to Ewan Bodenham @stephanspiekman.bsky.social @tweetisaurus.bsky.social Paul Upchurch & @pdmannion.bsky.social on describing Galahadosuchus, a new crocodylomorph from Triassic Gloucestershire. Reconstruction: @sketchy-raptor.bsky.social

anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

I agree with their complaints about how SVP have handled this. It is however somewhat easier to ban people if you are a non-membership, effectively commercial operation & the people you are banning wouldn’t have attended anyway.

Stellenausschreibung für eine Postdoc-Position (m/w/d) in Temnospondyl-Geochemie am Naturkundemuseum Stuttgart.

The Stuttgart Natural History Museum is offering a postdoc position (m/f/d) in Temnospondyl Geochemistry

E 13 TV-L, 100 %, 2 years

Application deadline: March 8th, 2026

➡ Further information: https://t1p.de/nwrfi

Curling is the obvious answer here.

Is there any Winter Olympics sport that doesn't look like all the participants are hell-bent on a short life?

Just what is it about a successful senior female academic that upsets you so much “coldspell”? Creating an anonymous account literally just to post this & harass her is pathetic.