Horses and Squirrels and Dogs, Oh My!

First and foremost, (belated) congratulations Lys! Depending on how you figure these things, having been through the Bristol MSc program together makes us all either academic siblings or cousins. Either way, you always like to see your family do well, and the number of people that have gone on to PhD programs from our year is really phenomenal (and, I think, uncharacteristic). I'm sure you'll all agree that this is yet more evidence that ours was the greatest MSc class ever...
Secondly, since the original purpose of this blog was to keep one another updated on what we were working on, I thought I'd announce that I've finally - after several false starts - settled on what exactly I'll be doing for my dissertation project. Most of you are, I imagine, at least vaguely familiar with the mid-Miocene climatic optimum. For those of you that aren't, it was a period of global warming that peaked around 16 million years ago at temperatures that are right around those predicted by several models of modern climate change. Of course, one of the great questions of our age is how climate change can affect ecology, and I like to think that paleontology has some answers. I'll be looking at a transect along the west coast of North America (Oregon-Mexico) for the duration of the Miocene to see if any trends in body size are apparent. I have two hypotheses to test. First, body size within taxa should increase the further north you go, as has long been observed in extant animals. Second, the mid-Miocene climatic optimum should lead to a decrease of body size, a trend which should reverse once steady cooling sets in later in the Miocene. Of course, I can't look at every Miocene mammal out there, or I would be at this forever. So, I spent a good deal of last week leafing through the literature and playing around on MIOMAP to pick three taxa that represent different ecological categories and body sizes and I wound up opting to look at canids, sciurids, and equids. Yes, after my childhood dreams of working on dinosaurs, I'm now looking to get my PhD by studying dogs, squirrels, and horses. That might have bothered me once, but I've now come around to the point of view that the question is much more important than the taxa you use to answer it, and these three families are ideal for looking at ecological changes in the mid-Miocene, in that they all have very good fossil records and very well resolved phylogenies (plus, by studying horses, I get to add my name as a tiny footnote to a list that includes Huxley, Marsh, and Osborn, among many others). I won't bore you all with the methods; suffice it to say I'll be making a lot of trips to California, which is no great hardship.
That's my plan for the next few years; what have all the rest of you been up to?