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Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), the nineteenth century British naturalist, has many claims to fame. To mention just two, he is often referred to as the the “father of biogeography” and came up with the idea of evolution through natural selection independently and concurrently with Charles Darwin (he co-authored the paper with Darwin in 1858). Alfred Russel Wallace ca. 1895 Unfortunately, his great accomplishments are often overshadowed compared to Charles Darwin, though this has been rectified to some degree through numerous recent events and books to mark the centenary of his death in 2013. Sculpture of Alfred Russel Wallace in the...

Wing venation patterns in insects provide useful characters with which to classify living and fossil insects. Recently, quantification of its shape using landmarks (morphometric analysis) has increased the potential of wing venation to distinguish individual taxa such as species. However, the use of wing landmarks in elucidating how the species are related to one another (phylogenetic analyses) remains largely unexplored. In research just published in the journal Cladistics, Adrien Perrard and colleagues tested landmark analysis under parsimony (LAUP) to include wing shape data in a phylogenetic analysis of hornets and yellow jacket wasps. Using 68 morphological characters, nine genes and wing...

Although the main activity at Siri Scientific Press is the publication of specialist natural history books focused on palaeontology and entomology, there is more to us than that! We are also involved in academic research activities and are always happy to take a little time out for the fun things as well, in addition to trying to encourage youngsters with an interest in science and nature. On Tuesday and Wednesday we were happy to host Dean Lomax, the author of two of our titles: Dinosaurs of the British Isles and Fossils of the Whitby Coast. In addition to the discussions...

On Saturday we visited the Yorkshire Fossil Festival in Scarborough. Although it is rather late in the year, the weather was glorious. For most of the day there was barely a cloud in the sky. There were plenty of exhibits aimed at people of all ages and interests (e.g. fossils, minerals, meteorites, etc.), including exhibits from the local Rotunda Museum, in addition to those from  further afield, e.g. the Natural History Museum, London, the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, as well as learned societies such as the Palaeontological Association and the Geological Association. Our author, Dean Lomax (of Dinosaur...

Have you ever wondered about what the first animals to move from the oceans onto the land looked like? How about whether or not there is any evidence of them in the fossil record and if so where does it come from and what are the key fossils that provide the clues? The answers to these questions have been provided in our beautifully illustrated book: Solving the Mystery of the First Animals on Land: The Fossils of Blackberry Hill, published in July. To find out more about the remarkable fossil trackways and body fossils of the first forays onto land...