The ninth palaeontological expedition to the Tran dinosaur site, discovered in 2017, has begun. The scientific team is led by Assoc. Prof. Dr Latinka Hristova from the National Museum of Natural History at BAS (NMNHS-BAS), and the participants include palaeontologists Assoc. Prof. Dr. Docho Dochev from Sofia University, Asst. Prof. Vladimir Nikolov (NMNHS-BAS), Prof. Marlena Yaneva, a sedimentologist from the Geological Institute of BAS, and two student volunteers. The scientists’ fieldwork began on 27 July and will continue until 3 August. The expedition can already boast its first modest successes: several fragments of carapaces from side-necked turtles of the Bothremydidae family, a crocodile tooth, a poorly preserved and incomplete dinosaur bone, several small bone fragments which, at this stage, cannot be taxonomically identified. The team [...]

Dr. Greg Graffin visited the National Museum of Natural History on July 10 at the invitation of Assoc. Prof. Tihomir Stefanov, the museum’s deputy director. Dr. Graffin holds a PhD in zoology from Cornell University and is a professor of natural sciences at the University of California and Cornell University. His research interests lie in the fields of evolutionary biology and palaeontology. In addition to being a zoologist, Dr. Graffin is the lead singer and co-founder of the Bad Religion band which is participating in the sixth edition of the Midalidare Rock in the Wine Valley International Rock Festival. The two toured the new storage facilities for the scientific collections built with European funding under the DiSSCo project where Assoc. Prof. Stefanov gave him a [...]

The Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research of BAS (IBER–BAS) hosted the specialized training course “Quantitative Numerical Analyses and Data Stewardship Training” which took place from June 15 to 19.  The event was organized as part of the COST Action CA23116 – Open Palaeoecological Data: Analysing the Past, Building Foresight (PalaeOpen). Sixty researchers from 35 scientific institutions in 18 countries participated in the training. The main objective of the COST Action is to deepen understanding of environmental changes over millennia and the adaptation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to climatic and anthropogenic impacts through the analysis of various types of palaeoecological data. The initiative promotes the synchronization, standardization, and integration of these data into a unified European system for their storage and sharing, thereby contributing [...]