FROM THE EXECUTIVE EDITORS

We are pleased to present the second issue of the seventh volume of Palaeontologia Electronica. We have now published more than 65 papers since our first issue in 1998, and this year, with the release of issue 7.1, the main PE site received more than 300,000 hits in a single month. This success would not be possible without the combined support of our readers, our financial sponsors (The Palaeontological Association, The Paleontological Society, and The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology), our production editor (Jennifer Rumford), and our volunteer staff.

Regardless of whether one lived in the US or elsewhere, 2004 was imbued with the US presidential elections. The topic has spurred lively debates on more than one palaeontology list, especially PaleoNet and VertPaleo. Concerns about the spread of anti-evolution legislation in American and elsewhere were voiced, especially over the sale in National Park bookshops of a Creationist account of the formation of the Grand Canyon. The book was opposed by the Grand Canyon National Park superintendent Joe Alston and a number of professional scientific groups (‘secular scientists’, according to the Southern Baptist Convention’s BPNews), including The Paleontological Society, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, and the Geological Society of America. Despite this opposition, more books were ordered and the Washington senior management of the National Park Service quietly dropped their planned hearing into sale of the book, stating that sales were high and they did not want to remove it from the shelves. While the Bush administration appears to support anti-evolutionism in many arenas, they appear to find use for it in the ‘War on Terror’. Via Dr Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, it was revealed that the Pentagon and the UK ministry of defense are planning a piece of software called the ‘Cambrian Program’ that will monitor social and defense systems around the world and predict possible threats and their long-term outcomes. Parker and other evolutionary biologists were invited to consult on the project after the US assistant secretary for defense read In the Blink of an Eye, a book written by Parker about the Cambrian Explosion.

We have had some turnover at PE, albeit more of a gradual rather than catastrophic nature. First, we have a new Reviews editor, Jason Head – who will be focusing on covering the latest paleontology-related books, CDs, and DVDs. We’ve heard through the grapevine that Jason was a childhood bookworm, so this should prove to be an interesting match. Many thanks to Ben Waggoner, who steered the Reviews section for the last few years. We are also pleased to announce that we now offer Arabic translation of our abstracts, courtesy of Dr. Ashraf Elewa of Minia University in Egypt. With this addition, PE abstracts are now available in Arabic, Spanish, French, German and Italian (though PE articles are all English language). Beginning with this issue, our articles are consecutively numbered to provide a unique identifier for each in line with various indexing standards for electronic publication.

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Whitey Hagadorn & P. David Polly
Executive Editors