UA HERPS official symposium thread

[majesty]

Yeah as far as membership in both UA HERPS and the symposium attendance, we have extremely strong support from the Paleontology wing, having PhD's, Masters (lots this year) and undergrads coming out in droves.

This year I think we have 15-20 ERAS members coming though.

Remember, all you ERAS members that I haven't met, come say hi to me so I know the score. I'll be MC'ing the event, so I won't be hard to find. If you still can't figure out who I am after the introduction (or miss it somehow) I'll have the frilled dragon on display. Mike, the co president, will be the guy with the ace of spades baseball hat with the henkel's leaf tailed gecko on display.

[Aloysius]

So does anyone want a ride? this helps me so I don't have to search for the place

[Kyle]

Any idea on when the symposium will wrap up tonight?

[Kioka]

It is about 15-20 minutes per talk, and a 45 minutes intermission.

So you are looking at at around... 3 hours, give or take.

[majesty]

We're anticipating it to end no later than 8:30, probably closer to 8. It all depends on how much time is needed to view animals during the intermission, last year I think it was around 40 minutes.

[cburte]

Guess I'm the first one home with pictures... lol
All I got pictures of was Dan's green tree python
First, here he is killing the macro mode on my camera


Here he is back in his transport tub... no flash


And with flash


(same thing happens taking photos of my ball python. no flash isn't enough light, but the flash just bleaches out the colours )

[osirus]

wowcant believe i missed this, damn work

[joeysgreen]

It was a grand time indeed

[cburte]

It was!

I was really impressed by how interesting the talks all were. Paleontology really isn't my thing, and my bio ended in grade 11, so I was afraid that everything would be either completely over my head, or just not at all interesting. And while much of it was completely over my head, what I did understand was actually incredibly interesting. From how almost EVERYTHING we know about dinosaurs comes from crocodiles, to how some weirdass algorithms can be used to increase our understanding of the relationships between different species, to why we still see some pyramiding in African tortoises even with a perfect diet, to the incredible anomaly that we know as turtles, to how leopard gecko embryos can be sliced up to study the 42 stages of development. It definitely had some decent diversity for only 4 formal speakers plus Ian's informal talk.

[kitchengod]

it was damm fine night, got to meet some new faces. thanks all that attended