Hey folks! Sarah here. I just wanted to send a quick message for those of you looking for the Fossil Friday Roundup. The roundup takes a fair amount of time to compile each week, and I have been finding it increasingly harder to keep up with posting it in recent weeks.
If you enjoy catching up on all of the latest in the paleosphere, I don’t want to let you down. But I need to take a step back from posting weekly roundups, at least for a little while. I’m brainstorming ways in which I could approach the Fossil Friday Roundup in different ways that are more time efficient for me as well as useful to you, our fantastic paleo community readers. I’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback, so please comment below letting me know if you like the roundups, what could be improved, what would be useful to you, etc.
We still very regularly post new open access papers on our Twitter feed, which you can access here.
I’d like to spend more time writing about actual recent papers, which has taken a back seat in order to make the roundup happen each week.
I also still want to support the National Fossil Day by letting the community know about events related to NFD. You can see my recent post on that here, which will be updated as frequently as I receive updates!
Anywho, just wanted to give you all an update. I don’t intend to put away the FFR forever, just for a little while so that I can spend some time bringing you other content. Please follow our Twitter feed for regular postings of new open access papers in all journals, as well as other content! And check back here for news on new papers, from me as well as my co-editors Andy and Jon!
Sarah Z. Gibson 
I do honestly check each week for your fossil roundup. I’m a park ranger at Hagerman Fossil Beds so I’m looking for non-dinosaur information, especially Pliocene epoch stuff, to share with my staff and the public. I do not have the schooling or experience to assemble anything like your lists and I appreciate them greatly.
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I love the fossil friday roundup, but understand how time consuming it must be. It is nice to have the links to the real papers all in one place. Other media sites do link major stories to papers, but they heavily favor dinosaurs over Devonian fish, etc. This blog gave equal time to brachiopods, insects,sharks, and more. Maybe you could do a monthly round up of just the paper links, and write your own articles on what you find interesting. LITC, i Know Dinos, Laelaps, and Everything Dinosaur (plus too many more to mention) can cover the rest. I always liked your individual stories, so more is great.
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I was always amazed at the sheer breadth of the list you give us each week and even with so many sites and podcasts to go for news these days, the Fossil Friday Roundup was still my first stop. I can understand how assembling such a list would be extremely time consuming. I agree with what was said already, perhaps bringing our attention to specific stories and critical finds (paleo headlines?) would still keep your eager fans appeased while giving you a much needed break! Good luck and be well!
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This site has been a boon in a time when summaries of a wide range of paleo papers seem to have become scarce. I second the praise for the Roundup’s range, in covering research in less charismatic lifeforms and research questions, as well as the usual high-profile dinosaurs and mammals. Might it lighten the workload to have a more distributed network of people collectively provide summaries to new papers?
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Thanks so much for all your hard work with Fossil Friday, it’s been such an excellent resource. At times I thought to myself ‘this would be a lot of work to maintain!’ so I totally understand the issue of workload, and definitely appreciate all the time and effort put in to it. Good luck for the future.
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