Re: growth of the discipline

[Una Smith <una@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Several statistically insignificant annecdotes:

At the Paleobotanical Section banquet during the Botanical Society of
America meetings last August, the people at my table tallied up the
number of people in North America who are taking students now vs. 10
years ago.  They found a small (but proportionately large) increase.
Add to this the vast increase in the number of paleoecologists, many
being members of the Ecological Society of America, plus the increasing
tendency for paleobotanists to publish cladistic studies including or
with application to modern taxa, and I think there is evidence not of
shrinkage of the field of paleobotany, but merely a shift in emphasis.

The Geology and Geophysics Department here at Yale is in the middle of
a job search for a vertebrate paleontologist.  The lectures have been
very well attended, with people drawn from several other departments
even though the lectures were not well advertised.  A number of people
have commented to me about the unusual level of interesting discussion
generated by the lectures.

The January 13th 1995 issue of _Science_ had a glowing news item about
Andrew Knoll's recent work.

	Una Smith			una.smith@yale.edu

Department of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, CT  06520-8104