WAVP, Mexico, etc.

Oh, hey.

Busy busy busy. Bored bored bored. Learning to cook. Growing my hair out. Still cold, snowy, and shitty. Almost no field work getting done. No inclination to blog.

I went to the WAVP (Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists) meeting in Yuma last month, which was pretty fun. Just as SVP is rad because everyone is there and you get to bump into them all, WAVP's particular charm is that it is a small meeting, which means you are hanging out chummily with the same small group of people the whole time. You probably didn't go, which means you suck. You should have gone. There were a LOT of margaritas, and we went to Mexico.

There were only about a dozen or so people, nearly all of them working on Pleistocene mammals, which means I got exposure to an epoch with which I do not normally delve into. Part of the appeal of the Triassic is how alien it is. It was one of the major periods of evolutionary experimentation in vertebrate history, and featured a wide variety of weird animals with only distant connections to anything living today. Aetosaurs and rauisuchians may be close to modern crocodilians in evolutionary terms, but you wouldn't know it without a long, careful look, and even phytosaurs have only a superficial resemblance to their modern analogues. Metoposaurs were not just giant salamanders, and most of the lizard-looking and mouse-looking things scurrying around in the undergrowth were actually quite different forms of diapsids and synapsids.

Alternately, the appeal of the Pleistocene is how close it is to us in time. So close, and yet so far. Less than 50,000 years ago when anatomically modern humans were already out and about in the world, there were giant sloths, lions, cheetahs, sabretooth cats, and elephants walking around on roughly the same topography we now inhabit. The Pleistocene is the modern world with the addition of a mild hallucinogen, which is a way makes it both more accessible and arguably weirder than the Triassic.

Yeah, anyway, we went to prospect and camp in early Pleistocene delta deposits on the northeast side of the Sea of Cortez. It looks like a fairly uniform pile of sand at a distance, which is a little disconcerting to someone who specializes in identifying and tracing distinctive sandstone and mudstone packages.

Anyway, margaritas. It was fun. Go next year, you dick.

The first PEFO Chinle Formation paper got published, but you probably already knew that. Second one in review, third one taking shape as soon as the FUCKING SNOW STOPS.

I'll just leave you with a couple links that will enrich your lives to no end.

Madness. I'd like to say that the things I spend lots of time working on are more worthwhile, but I'd probably be fooling myself. Once the music starts, pay attention to the timing.

Walrus.

LNJ

“Consensus and Exception merged once more. Rather, Consensus and some Exceptions merged. Other Exceptions, feeling the first icy brush of the Merged Void against them, edged slightly apart from it. As they felt the weak gravitational tug, they moved even further from it, compressing their own awareness within themselves. Several hard, gem-like flames flared into new existence.”
-Dave Sim