SVP

I was just sending in my abstract for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting this year (in scenic Cleveland...ugh...) and was curious whether any of the rest of you had plans to be there. It should be a good time; those of us that were there last year got to see Mike Benton get drunk at the afterparty, which in and of itself was worth the trip (I might also mention that Lara gave an excellent talk and I presented a much less excellent poster). If any of you are going, let me know if you might be interested in working out shared rooms (this seems very early, I know, but I'm told all the double rooms at the host hotel are already booked, and I'm betting that affordable rooms in downtown Cleveland are going fast).
While I'm writing here, how is everybody these days? People so rarely post here anymore, which is a shame, since I always enjoy hearing what people are up to. For my part, I'm getting ready to spend the summer helping to write a grant to fund our university museum and traveling to California to measure horse, dog, and squirrel teeth for my dissertation research. I hope everyone else's life lately has been equally or more exciting (though, really, I'm not sure how anything could be more exciting than fossil squirrel teeth...) and that I'll get to see at least a few of you in Ohio this October!

Hairy Babies!

Apologies, (Fossil) Phil, for once again dredging up a malaprop that I'm sure you'd just as soon we all forgot about, but I heard this story (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/623059/description#description) on the news this morning and I really felt I'd be doing you all a disservice by not bringing it to everyone's attention. The long and short of this article is that it's been hypothesized that the reason modern humans are hairless is because Cro-Magnon mothers might have selected their more hirsute offspring for infanticide. As far as I can tell, there's not a scrap of real evidence anywhere, but I suppose that's what you should expect from a journal called "Medical Hypotheses" and an author who's address is some town in New Jersey. At the very least, though, it emphasizes the potential importance of hairy babies in human evolution, a subject left strangely unadderessed by most prior paleoanthropological studies...