Lucy talk

Tuesday night, some colleagues and I attended a fascinating talk at the Linda Hall Library by Dr. Donald Johanson (presentation pictured above), the Founding Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.  Dr. Johanson discovered the most famous fossil in the world, "Lucy," and thereby gained worldwide recognition as a paleoanthropologist (he made certain that we understood that paleoanthropology is in fact NOT the study of old anthropologists).  The event space was packed and we all listened intently as he described the day on which he uncovered Lucy's remains in the Tanzanian desert (November 24th, 1974, incidentally 115 years to the day after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection), and the implications of that finding.  The species to which Lucy belongs, Australopithecus afarensis, is a member of the lineage that split from the other Great Apes (like the orangutan, pictured above with my niece) and gave rise to modern humans.

Evolution blogs

Please be sure to check out the blogs from my Evolution class at the bottom of the page!

Easter break

I hope everyone had a great Easter!  I spent the break at a beach cabin in Texas with my family.  Sun, sand, 85 degrees, and my little niece playing on the beach. Sounds terrible, right? I grew up very near this area so it was nice to go back home and see some of the features of southeast Texas that I have missed.  We spent a lot of time on this beach as kids, so it's exciting to see my niece continuing this tradition. I'm glad to be back in KC, but it was a fun diversion.  Pictured is a beach cabin very similar to the one in which we stayed, back lit by an amazing sunset.