I recently returned from Athens, Georgia, where I gave a talk for Darwin Days at the University of Georgia. John Gittleman is the Dean of the School of Ecology there, and he was my Masters advisor back in the day (I also worked for him as an undergraduate). It was great to see John's new haunts (his lab group has some awesome work on biogeography, extinction risk, and mammalian disease ecology rolling).
My talk was basically about new perspectives regarding the origin of flight in dinosaurs/birds, with an emphasis on biomechanics. What was neat was the crowd - the audience was large, but included only a handful of paleontologists. Most of the individuals in attendance were ecologists or ornithologists in the neontological sense. It was interesting to gauge their reactions, and the overwhelming result was that they all find fossil taxa fascinating. So here's a little commentary: fellow paleontologists, we need to hang out with more folks that work on the living stuff. Vertebrate biology folks, we need to hang out with invertebrate biologists (I have made it a point to spend time with entomologists over the years - it really helps, trust me).
Much agreed! I learned bunches from the physical anthropologists at Stony Brook. The unfortunate side-effect was that it was rather depressing to go to SVP, where "hot new techniques" had been used in anthro for years.
ReplyDeleteI ran into a similar effect after attending my first American Society of Biomechanics meeting. On the upside, I am now in all likelihood going to be an ASB regular (working on my abstract now for the 2012 meeting, in fact)
ReplyDelete"Fellow paleontologists, we need to hang out with more folks that work on the living stuff."
ReplyDelete<-- THIS.
What was neat was the crowd - the audience was large, but included only a handful of paleontologists.
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Nothing beats finding some useful information, for my research, keep em coming.
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