Tell us a little about yourself and what specifically attracted you to this site.

Do you have a specific interest in natural history?  Is your interest professional (potentially) or is it just a hobby?

Is there something in particular that you would like to discuss/debate on this site?

I will start.  My name is Bill and I live near Baltimore, MD.  My interest in natural history is not professional and is never likely to be so. 

What I find interesting about natural history is, Oh God where do I start...? 

I find the concept of deep time facinating.  I find evolution facinating in all of its shapes and forms, whether we are talking about the history of the universe, the history of the planet or a particular continent, or the history of a group of organisms. 

I am very interested in the heirarchies that are used to classify species...D,K,P,C,O,F,G,S,ssp

When I went to H.S. is was only aware of the 2 kingdom system of classifying all organisms--all organisms were considered to be either plants or animals.  Fungi, bacteria and many other single cell organisms did not fit into this system very well and in college I learned of the 5 kingdom system which added a kingdom for fungi, bacteria and the other single-cell organisms.  Within the past 10 years or so I have learned of the 3 domain system.  I feel that none of these systems really adequately fit viruses into the tree of life, so who knows...maybe there will be yet another major revision.

I am more knowlegable about animals than any of the other kingdoms, and in particular I know more about the vertebrates than any other group.  If you are a non-professional, non-specialist like myself these seem to be the easiest ones to learn about.

Enough about me and my particular obsession with natural history.  Tell us about yourself.

Hello Bill, my name is Logan. I live near Philadelphia, PA. I have a specific in evolution. I have always been fascinated by it. I used to study the rate of change in arboreal marsupials. That was quite interesting. That is until I fell in love with the ocean. I now study the ocean through books and the computer as much as I can. I love learning how different cetaceans and cnidarians came to be. It is just something that has always interested me. As for 'deep space', I have always enjoyed learning about interplanetary systems and celestial make-ups. I am unsure as to what you are refering to, but this is a start for now.

I know virtually nothing about cnidarians and their evolution.  Could you fill me in a little?

Hi, I guess I am a professional in the sense that I am an associate professor of microbiology and I direct a research lab that addresses the evolution of protein/protein interactions.  And I am an amateur in the sense that biology is far too large and diverse for one to claim accumen in anything but the smallest of corners - but it is all fascinating - happily my profession provides ample opportunity to continually expand my limited understanding.

Most of what I know about vertebrates is in the context of hosts --- but an undercurrent in my research is the coevolution of host/parasite interactions.

Along the lines of amateur - I am not well versed in eukaryotic taxonomy - but am hoping to put some time aside to get a better grasp on what is going on with the protists - my dissertation work was with Dictyostelium and I had also worked with Apicomplexa and trypanosomes before turning to bacteria - so I am embarrassed that I don't have a better grasp on their relationships to each other...  I like to point out to students that flagellates like Giardia lack mitochondria, but honestly I don't know if that is because they lost them, or diverged before other eukaryotes got them.

I'm just interested in the topic.

My first real interest and understanding did not come from school, but rather from watching Carl Sagan's series 'Cosmos' at about age 15

I'm particularly interested in the possibilities of tracing evolutionary history through DNA