SVP 2010 (Day 3): Archosaurs All Over

Wow, today was a long one. But certainly a good one. I started out the morning in the vertebrate joint symposium with a squamate mandibular symphysis talk by Dr. Casey Holliday, but with the exception of one hominid hip joint talk, it was all archosaurs of the air after that. I managed to make it to one of the only two pterosaur talks of this years meeting, and spent the rest of the morning in Technical Session X for some bird stuff. I've talked about it before, and read through most of the papers on the subject at this point in time, but hearing the fossil feather color talk blew my mind all over again. It was also interesting to learn that the research that lead to the discovery of fossil melanosomes in dinosaur feathers had started with fossil cephalopod ink. There were several talks on new finds in China, and as always, some talks on WAIR and the origin of flight in dinosaurs.

SVP 2010 (Day 2): Romer, Raffels, Reprints, and Roundtables

The second day of the SVP meeting was even better than the first (and the first was pretty good). The morning consisted of the Romer Prize Session, where predoctoral students present their research and one is selected to receive the Romer Prize for their outstanding contribution in vertebrate paleontology. There were some really great talks this year, covering everything from the phylogenetic relationships of lepospondyls, to cryptocleidoid tail fins, to dinosaur respiratory systems. The competition will be pretty tough this year, and there were a lot of stand out talks, but we'll have to wait until the Awards Ceremony on Wednesday evening to find out who the winner will be.

SVP 2010 (Day 1): A Night at the Museum

And what a night it was! The Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CMNH) played host to the SVP's 70th Annual Meeting Welcome Reception, opening its doors and several of its halls for a fantastic evening. Good food, good friends, good times all around. But despite all of that, the real stars of the show were the fossil vertebrates. This post will talk about a few of the dinosaurs (don't worry non-dinosaur folks, I talk about other vrertebrates in future posts, I swear), in their new exhibit "Dinosaurs in their Time". Here for your viewing pleasure, are a few photos of them (obligatory shot of me with Allosaurus fragilis at left).