The Talk

Bright and early this morning I gave a talk in front of professors and peers on the research that I've been doing for the last year. All and all, it went well. So well in fact that one of the grad students, a Mr. Takuya Konishi sent me an e-mail afterwards to regarding my braincase character:
"I have had some resistance to those characters as they are somehow hard to observe and also visualize in my mind especially with compressed fossil specimens in most cases, but I will no longer make any excuse whatsoever for not noticing those features now that you had skillfully demonstrated the usefulness of those "difficult" cranial characters on identifying the phylogenetic significance for both extinct and extant squamates, including some characters that no one ever suggested before. "
I just don't have the heart to tell him that alot of the characters that I used are almost if not totally impossible to see on the specimen that we're both studying. The specimen is partially crushed, distorted, filled with sediment and broken pieces of bone. The matrix/ sediment is the same color as the bone and some of the really important bits are obscured by other bones like the quadrates, pterygoids and supratemporal bar.