Alberta’s famous dinosaur palaeontologist…

The highly acclaimed dinosaur palaeontologist Professor Phil Currie of the University of Alberta recently added the Royal Canadian Geographical Society gold medal to a long list of awards and accomplishments. Alberta Primetime has published a very nice on-line film about Phil Currie called “Alberta’s doctor of dinosaurs”, which I highly recommend.

Phil Currie is one of the world’s leading experts on dinosaurs, especially theropods of the Tyrannosauridae, and has also worked extensively with the origin of birds. He is also married to Eva B. Koppelhus, a dear old palynology-colleague of mine 🙂

Hot topics within Earth and Planetary Sciences (September 2012)

Every third month Science direct lists the twentyfive hottest articles within a specific field of research. The list is based on number of downloads for each article. Unfortunately there is a lagtime between the download count over a three month period and the time the list is published, which means that the Hot topics list today (4/1 2013) still displays the most downloaded papers during July to September 2012. However, the list is still a good indicator if one wants to find out what’s hot in geosciences.

Based on the Science Direct list for July to September last year, I have compiled the three hottest topics within Earth and Planetary sciences, and these are:

1. Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution 11/25
2. Water treatment/resources 7/25
3. Environment and pollution 2/25

Since the last published list the research focus of the most downloaded papers have changed somewhat. The most downloaded papers are still within Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution but most of those papers deal primarily with evolution.

Number two on the list, Water treatment/rescources, deals primarily with the quality and supply of freshwater, a topic that is of growing importance in our overpopulated world. Strangely, only two papers deal with Environment and pollution, and both those papers are focused on plastic pollution of the marine realm.