The last 18 months have transformed many, many things, including the world of scientific conferences. The pivot to online virtual events means great things for accessibility and inclusion (although I do miss many things about the old-style in-person events too).
This week I gave a talk at the 2nd AsiaEvo Conference, which was organised as a joint meeting with the 23rd Annual Meeting of Society of Evolutionary Studies from Japan. I was one of the invited speakers for a symposium “The rise of fishes: the origin and early evolution of non-tetrapod vertebrates from a paleontological perspective” organised by Min Zhu and You-an Zhu, two great colleagues from IVPP in China.
I gave my talk “Morphometric Analysis of Lungfish Endocasts Elucidates Early Dipnoan Palaeoneurological Evolution” from the comfort of my own office in Adelaide, Australia, on early brain evolution of fossil lungfish (one of my absolute favourite topics in the world!) I can’t say much more about it right now as I’m preparing a paper for submission soon on this very topic.
There were some great talks in our session, but I especially enjoyed the work from Xindong Cui (also from IVPP) on new material of Youngolepis, a lungfish-like fish from the Lower Devonian of Yunnan, China. I look forward to seeing his work published soon!
Dr Alice Clement 