Sixth Triennial conference on the Secondary Adaptation of Tetrapods to Life in the Water

Two weeks ago today, I delivered a presentation on the first day of the 2011 Aquatic Tetrapods conference in beautiful San Diego, California. I had eight hours on my drive down to San Diego the day before to worry about how screwed I was: the last time I gave that presentation, it was only 20 slides longer, and took 50 minutes to deliver. I practiced it once Monday morning in front of Joe El Adli (our gracious host), and Yale students Rachel Racicot and Daniel Field - I barely fit it into 20 minutes. It all worked out fine, and in the actual presentation, I finished the last conclusion slide right as it counted down to zero. This was a fresh break from SVP tradition, which dicates that cetacean research is presented on the afternoon of the last day, giving you all week to worry about the presentation. This time, I was able to relax during the entire meeting.

My title slide for my taphonomy presentation.

It would be very difficult to summarize all the research presented, but I might be able to summarize a few of the highlights that stick out in my mind. Julia Fahlke (University of Michigan) gave a fascinating talk Monday Morning about basilosaurid and protocetid cetaceans with asymmetrical crania, and implications for the evolution of hearing underwater. I'll admit, when I read the abstract I was skeptical, but her presentation was pretty compelling - I'll wait to say more until it gets published, though. Brian Beatty presented some details of his research on meningeal ossification in cetacea, which appears to not be homologous to that in many other mammals. Larry Barnes showed us a new Paleoparadoxia skeleton the LACM has been working on from the Monterey Formation; it's virtually complete, with a very large, gnarly looking skull. Olivier Lambert gave a talk coauthored by Giovanni Bianucci on a new large assemblage of bizarre ziphiid fossils dredged from the seafloor off the coast of Spain; boy, there are some real freaks. Our Australian colleague Erich Fitzgerald presented a new juvenile aetiocetid skull from the Oligocene of Washington State which he's been slowly preparing with acid; needless to say, it's a beautiful specimen. Manuel Martinez, a Peruvian who is Christian de Muizon's Ph.D. student, presented on an incredible new toothed mysticete from the Oligocene of Peru - I won't give any details, but lets just say this will be a very, very important specimen.

Frank Fish gives a mini presentation on locomotor adaptations of various marine mammals, using an assortment of articulated limbs (a walrus forelimb is seen in the foreground).

On wednesday, we went over to the San Diego Natural History Museum for an osteology workshop on aquatic tetrapods. Due to the research focus of Tom Demere (Paleo curator) and Annalisa Berta, the majority of material out on display was from modern and fossil marine mammals. There was a great assortment of wonderful stuff out, and it was amazing to be there with so many other marine mammal (and otherwise) researchers there.

Several cetacean researchers are in this photo: Toshiyuki Kimura (foreground), Mette Steeman (behind "Tosh"), and Giovanni Bianucci (background, left) and Joe El Adli (background, right).

At the workshop, I caught Brian Beatty red-handed demonstrating his very technical method to determine the relative height of the bony tentorium (here on a skull of the Amazon river dolphin, Inia geoffrensis).

For a while, Daryl Domning gave a short presentation on the locomotion and forelimb of sirenians (using a Manatee forelimb skeleton).

Here, some of the brightest minds in cetacean paleontology scrutinize one of the weirdest fossil mysticetes: a new species of Herpetocetus under study by Joe El Adli. From left to right: Mette Steeman, Joe El Adli (standing), Felix Marx (leaning over skull), Meredith Rivin (background), Giovanni Bianucci (in glasses), and Olivier Lambert (in red).

Manuel Martinez, a Peruvian researcher studying with Christian de Muizon in Paris, did not waste a chance to photobomb. Here he is photographed with a cast of the skull of the bizarre extinct edentulous* walrus Valenictus chulavistensis.

Daryl Domning again gives a short presentation, this time on sirenian crania. Here he is showing a cast of the skull of the world's largest sirenian, the extinct Pliocene species Hydrodamalis cuestae (the ancestor of the "modern" Steller's Sea Cow).

My (soon to be) coauthor Morgan Churchill photographs an articulated hindlimb of the modern walrus.

Rachel Racicot (and Daniel Field) hung out with me for a bit in the type room at the San Diego Natural History museum while I photographed some fossil pinniped material. Skulls of gigantic Hydrodamalis cuestae sit on the table behind Rachel.

Marcus Ross and young earth creationism at the GSA 2010 meeting

Just within the last couple hours an email went out on the VertPaleo listserv, which was copied directly from Joe Meerts' blog, "Science, AntiScience, and Geology", and can be seen here.

Joe Meert reports on an incident at GSA, where Marcus Ross (well known to be a young earth creationist) was presenting non-creationist paleontological research. At the end of Ross' talk, Meert challenged him to explain how it fit into the context of young-earth creationist flood geological nonsense (my paraphrasing).

I'm rather surprised that there were so many people criticizing Meert for giving Ross a hard time or having any sympathy toward Ross at all. I feel a bit sympathetic towards Ross, simply because he does appear to have a genuine case of "scientific schizophrenia", and it must be quite difficult to remember every morning which pair of shoes to put on (functioning academic versus crazy-time fairy tale).

Meert understandably gave Ross a hard time, and for primarily one reason: Ross et al. go back to their creationist audience and say "look, we're real scientists! Our research is valid." And then say the same thing to the Texas board of education (which already has enough medieval loonies on it).

I completely agree with Meert on this: Marcus Ross et al. represent everything we as scientists and educators stand against. I know there's this whole thing called freedom of religion. But, if outside of the sphere of academia you tell people "I'm a real scientist, so you can believe everything I say, including that the flood killed all the dinosaurs" - that's a really, really malicious ethics violation, let alone a conflict of interest. I'm not advocating blacklisting and witch-hunting - but it is safe to say that the way things work currently just isn't good enough.

Granted, I understand GSA must not have any sort of abstract reviewing process - all you need to know is if "Geology of Star Wars" made it into a GSA poster session, young-earth lunacy can as well.

Unfortunately for my field, there seems to be a lot of interest by young-earth creationists in whale taphonomy; that will be covered in upcoming posts. And what happens with regarding citations of this work? Can their work be considered reliable? It certainly cannot be considered objective by any stretch of the imagination. Do we ignore it and not cite it? Do we call B.S.? This is a real problem.

4th Annual Earth Sciences Colloquium

More on Puijila later on this week - don't worry, I know its a hot topic, and I love seals, but I'll post on that later.

Last weekend I participated in the 4th annual Earth Sciences Colloquium, a student research conference done in our department for students and organized completely by students (go us!). In any event, I helped out quite a bit with it, and (gasp) was the technical chair for the conference - I communicated with all the presenters, organized the technical program, and moderated the oral sessions. It was nearly enough work so that I almost didn't present my talk, the subject of this post; the title page is below. I've included a bunch of slides I thought looked neat. On the title page are the logos of various institutions loosely involved with this research (and planned research projects/collaborations): J. Geisler (Georgia Southern U.), Rachel Racicot (Yale U.), and Frank Perry (Santa Cruz Museum).


Shockingly enough, I talked about cetaceans. Since it was for a more general audience, I spent a while talking about how awesome the whale fossil record is:



Here's a very general cladogram of whale phylogeny.



One of the really apparent morphological transformations is the posterior migration of the nares. In reality, I could have added a dozen or more transitional fossils in here.



And of course there's the whole hindlimb thing. I love how the pelvic girdle of Dorudon and other basilosaurids just kinda 'floats' in soft tissue.



On to actual data... I won't elaborate on this much, as this is the subject of my SVP abstract that I co-authored with Jonathan Geisler (Georgia Southern U.), and Frank Perry (Santa Cruz Museum of NH). Above is a partial skull of a late Pliocene pilot whale superimposed over a modern Globicephala macrorhynchus.



This is a recently collected gem - an articulated petrotympanic of a new genus of porpoise or basal delphinoid. This is associated with a partial skull that has yet to be completely prepared.


Lastly, here is a pie chart I made for fun, of all the different periotic morphotypes represented in the Purisima Formation (N = 120). I can probably get N up to 150 if I need to. In other news, my Master's thesis proposal has received its informal stamp of approval from my committee, so kickass.

Edit: I really need to use the spellcheck feature more judiciously; I typed up this post pretty fast, so the typos were pretty obvious. I apologize for all the grammer nazis. Just typos, not a sign of my incompetence.

2008 Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology

Sunday afternoon I victoriously returned from the 2008 meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. On saturday I delivered my first ever oral presentation, on the enigmatic/bizarre fossil baleen whale Herpetocetus bramblei.

The presentation was largely a success; the only negative feedback I received was on my "rather unfortunate [if not tragic] choice of font color". Which is a damn good thing, once you really think about it; much of the world's entire discipline of cetacean paleontologists were all there watching my talk, save one american, two italians, and a frenchman. In any event, I only received good feedback on the scientific content of my presentation... which is awesome. Oh, and ya, Michael Novacek was in the front row (!!!). I only cussed once during my presentation, which is a bit of a milestone for me.

Other than the success of my talk, I realized that I had racked up a total of 10 hours of sleep for the entire conference (4 nights); that averages about 2.5 hours of sleep a night. Too many friends were present, that and our broken thermostat in our hotel room that ensured a constant frigid 50 degrees. So when I did return at 4am, I was kept awake by my own shivering.

Besides the lack of sleep, I was rather surpised this year by the amount of time I spent talking 1 on 1 with my "colleagues" (can I actually say that now?) instead of going to other posters or talks. I must have only gone to a couple of dozen talks the whole week, and I averaged 30-40 minutes at a single poster, so I probably only saw a dozen of those. In any event... I am returning from SVP fully energized about research, with new projects (gulp) in hand with new colleagues.