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Hi all, I've been a member here for a while now and posted mostly about what I do with fossils for fun. This is what got me started as a kid interested in this whole thing. Splitting open a rock and being the first human to see the remains of a long-dead life form. I always knew I wanted to be a palaeontologist, but imagined myself as the more "traditional" palaeontologist out in the field probably extracting large vertebrate fossils from hard rock laid down millions of years ago. I thought I would start this thread to share some of my work with fossils that I do for a living. This is a little bit different to most of what is posted on here, but I thought some folks might enjoy it. I'm basically a paleoecologist dealing with younger deposits, so many of the principles are the same as paleontology and paleoecology in "deeper" time. I think we just "pretend" to have more precision! My work focuses mainly on environmental change during the Quaternary or about the last 2.6 million years. A lot of people study this time period since the Earth was pretty much in the same configuration as it is today (placement of the continents) and so we might be able to predict the future by understanding the past. I mainly work with lake and bog sediments as these are excellent archives of environmental change. Layers of mud slowly build up over time and incorporate all sorts of fossils that can tell us about the conditions in the lake or bog (e.g. water quality), vegetation and fires in the catchment (via fossil pollen and charcoal). I'm interested in how humans modify ecosystems through deforestation and agriculture and also long term climate change. I thought I would share some reports and pics of field trips - some recent ones and some still to come and share and describe the methods and results and what they actually mean. Watch this space!