Congratulations are due!
Audrey Aronowsky, Emina Begovic and Paul Bunje all received Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor awards for 2000-2001.

Paul Bunje received a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD—German Academic Exchange Service) grant to study in Germany next year.

Caroline Stromberg and Paul Bunje received Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Edward Davis has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support his dissertation research over the next three years, focusing on the interplay between changing climate and evolution of mammals in Nevada during the Miocene.

And congratulations to several undergraduate students in the Lipps Lab: Nicole Santos has been accepted into the Summer Research Internship Scholars Program at UCSD this summer. Cheryl Logan was awarded an undergraduate Summer Internship at the California Academy of Sciences. Cheryl, Kerry Nickols and Ben Elitzur were all accepted into next fall’s Moorea class.

And special congratulations to:

John Hutchinson, who will complete his dissertation and leave UCMP in May to spend two years as an NSF Biological Informatics postdoctoral fellow, working with Dr. Scott Delp at Stanford to develop new 3-dimensional biomechanical models of archosaur legs.

Healy Hamilton who will be joining the California Academy of Sciences next fall as the Director of their Center for Biodiversity Research and Information.

Alicia Cordero and her husband Carlisle Johnston on the birth of their new daughter, Liliana on January 28—7 lbs and 13 oz and growing!

A fossil chain of Crepidula limpets recently presented to UCMP. (photo by Colleen Whitney)

Love those limpets
The beautiful fossil above is a chain of Crepidula, slipper limpets, originally collected from a Pliocene deposit in Oregon. These unusual mollusks all begin their lives as males, then become females later in life. This chain, which includes smaller males and larger females, contains more individual shells than have ever been documented in a living colony.

The specimen was formerly on display at the US Geological Survey (USGS) in Menlo Park, although it was not part of the Survey collection. Carol Reiss, a representative of the USGS, recently presented it to UCMP on behalf of Dr. John Armentrout, the collector.

Fighting science illiteracy
Faculty Curator Jere H. Lipps gave the keynote address to the Arkansas Academy of Science’s 85th Annual Meeting on Friday, April 13 at the University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR. His lecture covered science and the mass media (stressing the high level of scientific illiteracy in America) and critical thinking and evidential reasoning as it is applied to daily life as well as to science. He also drew attention to some of the critical issues in people’s lives that can be dealt with scientifically, such as global warming, gun violence, the drug wars, creationism, etc. The audience (and their comments) included professional scientists (“Right on!”), university and college students (“Awesome!”) and NRA members (“Jere, you and me got us a little problem here”). The talk was reported along with comments on the local Little Rock NPR radio station on Monday, April 16.

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May, 2001