Linneus 300th bash

Hello all

I trust that you are all well and engaged in interesting activities. I thought I might post a quick update on the most recent conference attended by paleopadwans (myself and Emma), since we're not really using this site for much palaeo talk (owing, of course, to having better sites to vist, like facebook for example). Anyway, the Royal Society held a tercentenary evolution themed extravaganza earlier this week for good old Linneus and these were the main events: Dick Jeffries (whom some of you may know) got arsy with a lot of people, there was a mass debate about whether we should refer to one half of the Protostomia as lophotrochozoans or spiralians (joy!) and I may have inadvertantly let slip that I thought some aspects of the MSc were a load of poo to Paddy Orr, Nic Butterfield and Mat Wills over lunch in Pizza Hut (the pepperoni had really gone to my head). And that was about it. Oh, there were some interesting advances being talked about too but these mainly involved gene expression experiments and loads of pictures of embryos with supernumary limbs etc, there wasn't much talk of fossils. Anyway, for those of you attending Paris in a few weeks, good luck! Who's going to Palass and what are we all doing with our grant money? I am rotting thiomargarita (I got bored of embryos) and contemplating lophotrochozoan (not spiralian) decay paths and planning to make Briggs' mineralization experiments look like kindergarten projects. Them there's fightin' words!
But enough about me......what about you????