SVP roundup

 

After returning from the SVP meeting I was tied up working on the museum's 2017 budget, but now I have a chance to give a brief report.

At SVP poster sessions, the posters are grouped by topic, so we were next to several other proboscidean projects. That meant that many of the paleontologists that work on fossil elephants had a chance to stop by and take a look at our work.

Feedback was pretty much universally positive. No one we spoke with voiced any disagreement with our basic observations, that California and Idaho 3rd molars were thinner than those from other areas. There was a lot of discussion about why the molars are thinner (for example, whether or not the thin molars are adaptive) and about the implications for mastodon growth patterns.

Our presentation was on the first night of the meeting, but there were lots of opportunities during the rest of the conference to have productive conversations with other workers. We also made preliminary arrangements for collecting additional data.

More to come!