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.