Pyenson Lab

More about the value of field books...

As I mentioned previously, fieldnotes -- the primary documents for natural history collections -- are key resources in museums, but they usually don't get much love. Hopefully, the Smithsonian's Field Book Project will go towards changing that.

In a guest blog post on the Field Book blog, my long-time colleague, co-author and car doctor Edward Davis from the University of Oregon writes about the effort to recover the hidden legacy of paleontologists at his institution. Read more here.

Blue whale barrel rolls

Out this week is a fantastic new paper in Biology Letters by my colleague Jeremy Goldbogen and his co-authors. The title of the paper says everything that you need to know: "Underwater acrobatics of the world's largest predator." Blue whales, being the aforementioned predator, execute hitherto unknown behaviors while lunge-feeding, and it's thanks to a new generation of animal-borne instrumentation that we can find out these amazing facts.

Jer has been showing this video in talks for the past year, and it's fun to see this paper finally out. Read the whole paper here, and check out the video below.