Counting Down

It's just a little over a month until I give my talk on the braincases of snakes an varanids (including mosasaurs). What have I accomplished in the last 6 1/2 months of hard work? Well, I can identify just about every little bump and nob on the braincase but I really can't find that many sinapomorphies (not that anyone was expecting me to). Not only that, but even at this late date, I can't assess any of the intracranial features. That would require disarticulating (ie breaking open) the braincases and I really don't think that the people that we borrowed them from would be too keen on that. I spent 6 hours in the lab today, and I only really managed to get down 2 pages of notes on the skulls (no synapomorphies found, but alot of autapomorphies of snakes and few instances where a few other researchers are just wrong, contradict themselves or making a huge deal out of absolutely nothing). And to think that I'm actually considering speciallizing in squamates as a career. Well, I suppose that it beats competing for the dinosaur jobs.
I really wish that I had a less open ended project. The other students have to figure out if a certain fossil belongs to a certain clade. Granted, it's not as easy as it sounds, but at least all they have to do is see if the fossil matches the diagnostic characteristics in the literature, not come up with a few new ones. I come up with the stupidest sinapomorphies too. They usually have to do with the most minute details of the skull, like the path of the palatal nerve (aka the palatal branch of the facial nerve/ CN VII) in relation to the suture between the prootic, the basisphenoid and the basioccipital. If you understand what I just said and have even the slightest idea of why its important, then you're clearly over-educated. In reallity, that kind of thing probably doesn' t make the least bit of difference and has probably changed several times during the evolution of snakes. It's practically a rule that you see a mosaic distributuion of characters in intermediate forms. Not the case here, its either a snake or its not, with nothing in between.