The Phenoscape project had a strong presence at the largest Vertebrate Paleontology/Comparative Anatomy conference in the world this year, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting. In one of the large conference halls, and in front of a packed audience, I gave a talk on the history, goals and background of the Phenoscape project (“Phenoscape: A New Anatomical Ontology of Vertebrates”). The authorship also included Paul Sereno, Paula Mabee, Todd Vision and Hilmar Lapp. The talk was well received, and several attendees expressed great interest in our work. The difficult part now is to make sure this first spark of interest is maintained – this can be difficult when the community has not been exposed to ontologies before and the project appears to be so different from anything they have done before – but we’ll do our best to stay in contact with those people that expressed strong interest.
Alex Dececchi presented a poster on Phenoscape at the same conference (Phenoscape: bridging the gap between fossils and genes – his co-authors were J. Balhoff, W. Dahdul, N. Ibrahim, H. Lapp, P. Midford, P. Sereno, T. Vision, M. Westerfield, P Mabee and D. Blackburn), making sure that even those that could not attend the talk would get an opportunity to learn more about our exciting work.
Nizar Ibrahim, University of Chicago
Phenoscape 