GO CHIEFS!!!

I was fortunate enough to attend that UNBELIEVABLE Chiefs game on Sunday when they beat the undefeated Packers 19-14.  What an amazing experience!  We were high-fiving and hugging people we didn't even know (as long as they were wearing red).  The whole crowd was in such disbelief that I think it took a few seconds to set in after Orton knelt it out on the last play.  Pictured is the Chiefs bus we rode in/tailgated on and that final play  from our seats in the 13th row.  What a day!  GO CHIEFS!!!

Winter Break

Well, finals ended yesterday and today officially marks the beginning of winter break.  For my research students and I, last week started off with some great news: our latest publication came out!  The title page is above, and the author line includes two of my former undergraduate research students, who are now published in an international journal!  That was exciting news, and our current research is also looking very promising.  My current student and I hope to work on the next publication over this long, relaxing winter break...

Post-Thanksgiving

It was 81 degrees last week when I landed in Houston and now I'm sitting in my office, wearing my puffy coat.  It's quite the climatic transition.  It was great to be home for a few days and see my family (my niece and my parents' pygmy goats are pictured here).  I hope you all got to do the same, perhaps minus the pygmy goats.
Now we're all getting back in the swing of things.  I just gave the last lab practical for my Monday Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy lab section and graded their cat dissections.  They did a phenomenal job with their dissections this semester, as did my Friday lab students, and I am always sad to see a semester of "Comp Vert" lab end.  However, in the spring I'll be teaching Evolution, Anatomy & Physiology, and Biology Field Trip; so there is plenty to which to look forward.

Thanksgiving week

Since we have an abbreviated week, this will be an abbreviated blog post.  I will be going back to Texas over the break to see my family, so I thought now would be a perfect time to include a recent pic of my niece.  She just turned a year old, and this is a picture of her staring at a ball python at the pet store.  She's already interested in snakes and adores animals, so I'd say she's off to a great start!

Honeysuckle battle!

On Saturday, Linda Lehrbaum and I led a group of gung-ho Rockhurst students as they worked to rid the beautiful glade at Swope Park of invasive brush honeysuckle.  This was a Kansas City Wildlands workday, and the work group was comprised entirely of Rockhurst Plant Biology and honors students.  They were hardcore workers, not bothered by the manual labor, the cold wind or the overcast skies (or the fact that they had to get up early on a Saturday).  The picture shows the group, saws crossed, proudly posed in front of one of many piles of conquered honeysuckle. 
The next KCWildlands event, on December 3rd, is described below.  Please come out to Olathe to pick out and cut down your very own Christmas tree while at the same time helping to decrease the local population of invasive native red cedars!

This weekend my research student and I drove to Wichita, KS, to attend the Kansas Herpetological Society Annual Meeting.  He presented a paper yesterday concerning the evolutionary history and classification of a group of small snakes that are relatively common in the Midwest.  He did a great job (unsurprisingly) and we gleaned quite a bit from the other talks as well.  We also felt the earthquake on Saturday night, which was a really bizarre experience for us both.

One of the best parts of my job is taking undergraduate research students to professional conferences to present their original research.  This was especially exciting because our project may have taxonomic implications (i.e. our work may divide one recognized species of snake into two).  We plan to do some further research, which we initiated this morning, and publish a paper about the study next semester.