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[ 2025-11-03 ] The Country of the Iguanodon, by Gideon Mantell – Two Versions Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
[ 2025-11-02 ] Gideon Mantell’s 1851 Guide to Fossils at British Museum Crystal Palace Dinosaurs
[ 2025-10-14 ] Society for the Study of Speciation: Bibliographic Analysis Using LLM Featured
[ 2025-10-05 ] Using LLMs to query 1939 International Genetical Congress Blog
[ 2025-10-04 ] Monopoly 1961 ‘Rules for a Short Game’ Instruction Card (60-90m) Blog

What’s the STSNewsRoom?

Dr Jean-Baptiste Gouyon and I started the STSNewsRoom in 2021 to bring together different summer activities underway in UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS). We wanted to expand student contributions to the department’s […]

The Tzar Nicholas Suspension Bridge under construction in 1853 as photographed by John Cooke Bourne (National Museum of the History of the Ukraine)

John Cooke Bourne’s Flirtation with Russia and Ukraine

Great news: John van Laun’s MPhil 2021 study of John Cooke Bourne’s tinted lithographs of the London and Birmingham Railway is available via UCL Discovery as open access. I hear from John there is an aside […]

George Gaylord Simpson, 1956 (courtesy American Philosophical Society Library).

Patricide in the Repeated Assassination of George Gaylord Simpson

George Gaylord Simpson was the undisputed American heavy-weight in macro-evolutionary theory prior to paleobiology’s disciplinary formation in the 1970s. Memory of Simpson’s intellectual influence on this next generation of thinkers is tied intimately to aggressive […]

Charles Darwin's Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Penguin Classics), 1890 second edition, edited by Professor Joe Cain and Dr Sharon Messenger ISBN 9780141439440

Reading Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Published in 1872, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was a book at the very heart of Darwin’s research interests – a central pillar of his ‘human’ series. This book engaged some […]

Biodynamica - Basile J. Luyet from volume 1, 1934-1938

Biodynamica, published by Basile J. Luyet

Historians of the synthesis period in evolutionary studies, aka evolutionary synthesis, are deeply familiar with the Columbia Biological Series. This monograph series included key texts for the American evolutionist community, including Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (1937) Genetics […]

Dunn in Germany 1928, in Dunn Papers, folder: “Photographs #1”. Courtesy of APS Library.

The Situation in Genetics: Leslie Clarence Dunn’s 1927 Russian Tour

In 2003, I co-authored publication of a transcription of Leslie Clarence Dunn‘s 1927 report on genetics research facilities in Russia. This appeared in the Mendel Newsletter, published by the American Philosophical Society Library as Joe Cain […]

ProfJoeCain answers question from UCL Talking Heads: What is your favourite place on campus?

Where Is Your Favourite Space on the UCL Campus?

UCL Talking Heads asked me to answer some questions about student life and teaching at the university. In this film, I answer the question, “Where is your favourite space on the UCL campus?” This is a project […]

Sergei Chetverikkov, Russian population geneticist

Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov (1880-1959) Russian population geneticist

Sergeĭ Sergeevich Chetverikov (=Tschetwerikoff) was a Russian entomologist, an expert on butterflies, and a pioneer of population geneticists. Born into a well-educated, professional family, Chetverikov entered the University of Moscow in 1900, graduating six years […]

Statue from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the British Museum

The statue from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the British Museum is a beautiful, captivating object. It is a “moai”. Its name is Hoa Hakananai’a (loosely translated to “Stolen Friend”, sometimes spelled Hoa Haka Nanai’a). […]

Plesiosaur skeleton (Thalassiodracon hawkinsi) cast at UCL Grant Museum of Zoology.

Thalassiodracon – Plesiosaur at UCL Grant Museum of Zoology

Humans came to understand the significance of fossils only in the early nineteenth century: their extraordinary variety and quantity, forms unlike anything seen in the world today, incomprehensibly vast periods of time for layer upon […]

Professor Joe Cain 2025