Biology Field Trip group pic's

Each time we entered a National Park on our Biology Field Trip, we took the obligatory group picture by the sign.  In this series, you can tell that the weather was growing progressively colder and wetter as we traversed South Dakota and Wyoming.

Biology Field Trip

We are back from our AMAZING Biology Field Trip to Badlands National Park, the Black Hills, Yellowstone National Park, and Grand Teton National Park.  I am not the designated photographer on our trips (this time, that was left primarily to Dr. Chad Scholes and Jay Sheth), but this is my favorite of the few pictures I took.  We hiked to the top of a plateau in the Badlands to watch the sunset.  Senior student Ben Bira and I clambered to the top of two hoodoos (rock spires), which turned out to be the best seats in the house.  This is a picture of  Ben from atop my hoodoo as the sun disappears behind the mountains.

Gallery Opening

On Friday night, Drs. Baceski, Martin, Miller, and Kovich and I attended a gallery opening for Rockhurst's own Anne Austin Pearce.  The opening was at the Sherry Leedy Gallery in the Crossroads Arts District, a district that hosts an evening event on the First Friday of each month in which local artists are celebrated and their art displayed.  Anne's work is stunning and the chance to discuss the pieces with her introduced a personal element that made them even more extraordinary.  The piece pictured here is entitled "The Ride;" and though I loved all of the paintings on exhibit, I was most moved by this work.

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.

Induction Pictures

Posted are pictures of our student and faculty speakers (see previous blog entry), respectively, as well as their audience on Sunday.