fossils. After I started working on the origin of birds, I realized that the traditional paleontological approach was not suffi cient for understanding bird origins. To get a reasonably complete picture of the evolution of avian features, we need not only data from fossils but also insights from other disciplines. So I started working with the developmental biologists Cheng-Ming Chuong of the University of Southern California and Susan Mackem of the National Cancer Institute, the comparative genomicist Guojie Zhang of the University of Copenhagen and the China National GeneBank, and the biomechanist Robert Dudley of the University of California at Berkeley, among others, in order to understand how feathers and wings evolved and how avian fl ight originated. This approach turned out to be fruitful, and I've coauthored several papers with these collaborators in different disciplines. I've also been communicating a lot with Huanming Yang of the Beijing Genomics Institute-one of China's leading genetics scientists-and we've even co-organized academic symposiums to promote crosstalk between paleontology and neontology. The history of evolutionary biology is all about integrating an ever-growing number of disciplines into evolutionary studies, and I believe that this trend will continue into the future. What do you think about postpublication peer review of papers? Post-publication peer review is a great idea and defi nitely benefi ts the scientifi c community. I believe that almost every scientist has at some point wanted to correct some mistakes or fl aws in a paper that he or she just published, but there's never been a good mechanism for that. Furthermore, the current model of peer review normally involves only two or three referees for each submission, and this limited number of minds and eyes can easily produce biased or careless comments. Postpublication peer review helps to provide a better, less-biased assessment of the research.

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