Congratulations: Hutton Award, several Ph.D. student publications in OU paleontology

Several other members of the paleontology group here at the University of Otago have made some recent advances in their research and careers that I felt should be noted here.

First and foremost, last month my adviser Ewan Fordyce was awarded the Hutton Medal in Geology by the Royal Society of New Zealand. The award is given annually to researchers for outstanding work on animal, plant, and earth sciences. Ewan's long standing (~30 years) focus on the paleontology of sharks, penguins, and cetaceans of New Zealand was recognized by this award, and it was quite a surprise for him.

R. Ewan Fordyce (left) after awarding of the Hutton Medal; Alan Musgrove (right) appeared in this university photo for the 2012 Humanities Aronui Medal. From www.otago.ac.nz

I would also like to congratulate my labmates Gabriel Aguirre, Carol Loch, Felix Marx, and Cheng Hisu Tsai for getting manuscripts accepted for publication. Gabriel just got a paper from his dissertation on a new fossil dolphin accepted in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology; Carol has gotten several papers regarding cetacean teeth accepted over the past few months in various journals (e.g. Marine Mammal Science, Zoomorphology); Felix has gotten a paper on mysticete phylogeny accepted; and Tsai has gotten a paper on Pleistocene gray whales from Taiwan accepted in the Paleontological Journal. As for myself - I just got something accepted too, so there's some nice icing on the cake. 

Congratulations to Ewan on the award all my labmates on their accepted papers - I'll discuss some of these papers in detail once they're out.