The 2023 annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology was hosted by the Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) at Duke Convention Center on October 18-21¹. It was the second physical meeting post-COVID since last year’s meeting in Toronto. It was my fifth SVP meeting (my first being the 2018 Albuquerque meeting), and my third physical meeting.

I arrived in Cincinnati two days before the conference (October 16-17) to visit the Geier Collections and Research Center (Figure 2), the CMC’s offsite storage facility that houses, among other things, its vertebrate paleontology collection. My evaluated a collection of latest Cretaceous-earliest Paleocene mammalian microfossils collected from the Bug Creek Anthills in McCone County, Montana, one of the most prolific fossil sites in the Hell Creek area. While there is Bug Creek material in most natural history museum and university collections in North America, including my workplace at the University of Washington, the Geier Center houses part of the original collections made by the University of Minnesota Bell Museum of Natural History (UM) and the Saint Paul Science Museum (SPSM) in 1961-1964. This material formed the basis of Robert Sloan & Leigh Van Valen’s groundbreaking 1965 Science paper “Cretaceous mammals from Montana”, where they described what was thought to be the oldest “archaic ungulate” placental mammal, Protungulatum donnae. Although the Bug Creek assemblage is now considered a composite of Paleocene and reworked Cretaceous fossils, “archaic ungulates” like Protungulatum are still an important piece of the puzzle of placental origins and evolution following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.

The old UM paleontology collections were transferred to the CMC Geier Center in December 2018. Unfortunately, not all of Sloan & Van Valen’s Bug Creek Anthills material made it to the Geier. The missing material included virtually the entire placental collection (353 specimens) from Bug Creek, Harbicht Hill, and Purgatory Hill (Figure 3) including all but one of the fourteen holotypes described by Sloan & Van Valen’s 1965 papers, as well as Van Valen’s 1978 magnus “The beginning of the age of mammals”². I was warned of this ahead of time by curator Glenn Storrs and collections managers Cameron Schwalbach and Brenda Hunda (also members of the SVP 2023 host committee), who were otherwise exceptionally helpful during my visit.  Still, I hoped to find the specimens in the Geier Center, just mislabeled or misplaced in the wrong drawer. But by the second day of my survey (October 17) I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Although my lab has casts of most of Sloan and Van Valen’s UM/CMC “Bugcreekian” placental specimens, which my advisor Gregory Wilson Mantilla inherited from the late Bill Clemens, it is unfortunate the original material studied might be lost³. Still, the CMC visit was far from unproductive, as I identified and photographed 35 “archaic ungulate” specimens (out of the 615 ascension numbers I examined) that I plan to loan in the future for my dissertation research (Figure 4).

Following my visit to the Geier Center collections, I attended the conference’s opening Special Lecture at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, “The Nature of Hope” by Cincinnati Zoo director Thane Maynard. Maynard’s anecdotes on the zoo’s role in conserving large African mammals and birds, as well as his history of collaboration with Jane Goodall, were moderately entertaining in isolation, but the address still felt disjointed and out of place for a paleontological conference, in comparison to last year’s talk by Riley Black. A highlight was when Maynard brought out a live baby alligator for pets and photos after the talk, which certainly amused the archosaur specialists in the crowd (Figure 5). Afterwards, I spent time with Samantha van Mesdag and Russel Engelman at the Hilton Cincinnati’s Neverland Plaza restaurant bar, which became my favorite place in the city to hang out in the evenings (Figure 6).

Conference presentations began the next morning (October 18). I warmed up by attending Early Mammals & Carnivora technical session, sitting through talks on the latest research concerning Fruitafossor (Brian Davis), Morganucodon (Simone Hoffman), mesungulatids (Guillermo Rougier), Paleocene metatherians (Jonathan Bloch), and Eurotamandua (Timothy Gaudin). Although I intended to take notes on all talks the mammal sessions, I soon failed to achieve this goal; in the case of the “Early Mammals & Carnivora” session, the only carnivoran talks I listened to were on Plionarctos (Blaine Schubert) and Miracinonyx (Anthony Hotchner), as I had skipped out on the rest. Compared to previous SVP meetings, I spent less time simply listening to talks and reading posters, and more time networking with colleagues in the convention center ballrooms and lobbies, including friends I hadn’t seen or heard from since at least the Toronto meeting. Hence my lack of photos from most conference events, though SVP discourages photography during oral and poster presentations anyway.

The Welcome Reception dinner was held at the CMC. For many attendees, this was the opportunity to see the CMC’s paleontology galleries, particularly the recently renovated Ice Age Gallery’s showcase of specimens from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, widely considered the birthplace of modern American vertebrate paleontology (Figure 7). The gallery also contains an immersive walk-through diorama of the late Pleistocene in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky, complete with life-sized fiberglass models of dire wolves, ground sloths, flat-headed peccaries, stag-moose, and saber-toothed cats. During my exploration of the galleries, I was excited to meet Paul Sereno and Lars Werdelin in person for the first time, as both paleontologists were major inspirations during my youth! Afterwards, van Mesdag and I attended a late-night screening of the documentary short Dinosaurs of Antarctica at the CMC’s OMNIMAX theater, which to my pleasant surprise featured my dissertation committee member Christian Sidor’s work on Antarctic late Permian-early Triassic archosaurs and synapsids. However, I didn’t get to tour the CMC’s non-paleontological offerings.

Figure 6. The Hilton Cincinnati in Carew Tower on W 5^th St is the site of the Omni Neverland Plaza, a National Historic constructed in 1931 and part of the Historic Hotels of America program for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The ornate lobbies and ballrooms evoke a 1920s Art Deco take on a “city within a city” mixed-use development.

Having delivered my talk, I could “enjoy the rest of the conference”, to quote another attendee. On the morning of October 19, I perused the lobbies to network and catch up with friends, only occasionally listening in on the Preparators and Romer Prize sessions. Once again, this was unusual because I usually commit to attending the “Preparators” session, as I consider its talks more useful for informing operations within my lab than the Romer Prize talks, which I feel have increasingly strayed away from applied vertebrate paleontology toward generic phylogenetic comparative analyses of predominantly extant taxa. The only Preparators talk I attended was Haviv Avrahami’s evaluation of competing techniques for collecting and visualizing photogrammetric data, which is an urgent priority of my current research. Avrahami’s discussion was a worthy complement to Nick Baird & Ben Slibeck’s poster on the “fast, cheap, or good” methods of 3D modeling techniques in paleontology, and informed conversations I had with Anne Kort on my lab’s Macropod Pro 3D photogrammetry setup. A highlight of “Romer Prize” session was Anessa DeMers’s excellent study of phylogenetic and ecological signals in mammalian tooth root number, in which she advocated the need to “give roots a chance”.

Aside from a talk on the topographic diversity gradient in mammalian evolution (Tara Smiley), I missed the Mammal Paleoecology session. Bizarrely, I had more fun at the Theropod Flight Origins special symposium hosted by Michael Pittman and Hila Chase, where I was enthralled by discussions of the theropod flight stroke (Michael Habib), forearm heterochrony (Pittman, who had previously seen presenting his and Nadia Hadir’s research at the Hennig XL meeting in Ithaca this past July), African pterosaur wing morphology (Stephanie Baumgart), Eocene bat phylogeny (Matthew Jones), and the flight style of Microraptor (Maxime Grosmougin and Matthieu Chotard). In my opinion, the symposium benefit from contributions discussing the evolution of all volant vertebrate clades, rather than being laser-focused on avialian origins. Later that evening, I had dinner with Pittman and Chase, along with several other paleornithologists who participated in the symposium, at the Hilton Cincinatti’s Neverland Plaza restaurant bar. As a result, I missed most of this year’s Student and Postdoc Committee Roundtable Forum, only arriving just in time to express to Jack Tseng and James Napoli my interest in joining one or more SVP committees for future meetings.

Figure 7. Skeletal mounts of an American mastodon (Mammut americanum; left) and long-horned bison (Bison latifrons; right) in the CMC Ice Age Gallery.

On October 20, I mainly did the same things I did the previous day, with less listening and more active networking. Still, I did catch Paul Sereno’s reveal of the upcoming FossilScope app for reconstruction ontology in the Methods & Paleohistology session, before attending the Euarchontoglires & Xenarthra session’s talks on Paleocene plesiadapiform crown types (John Hunter), Eocene New Mexican notharctines (Mary Silcox), Miocene Kenyan hominoids (Kieran McNulty), Eocene Texan omomyids (Edward Kirk), and pilosan basivertebral foramina (Erin Zack). I revisited the Methods & Paleohistology session to catch Nathan Myhrvold’s talk on spinosaurid limb bone compactness, based on work co-authored with Sereno and Baumgart. I was bummed that I didn’t see Myhrvold for the rest of the conference, as he is a major sponsor of the University of Washington’s Hell Creek Project through the Myhrvold and Havranek Charitable Family Fund; and his discussion of statistical assumptions in discriminant clustering methods indirectly tie into issues I’m currently tackling in my research. In afternoon, I attended a series of talks in Actinopterygians section pertaining to issues in the morphological phylogenetics of ray-finned fish, with worked examples from bobasatraniiform “paleoniscoids” (Jack Stack), amphicentrid eurynotiforms (Abigail Caron), Devonian stem-actinopterygians (Tetsuto Miyashita), and paphosiscids (Matt Friedman).

My evening was spent at the Annual Benefit Auction and Social (Figure 8). During the silent auction, I won a large stack of old reprints on ungulate evolution, with the intention of giving them to a colleague in my lab who was focusing on early artiodactyl evolution. For the main event, the SVP auctioneers, who dress in costumes every year, went with a Star Wars theme. But the force was not strong with this auction compared with previous years, as to my knowledge no items were sold for more than $4,500. The advertised star attraction, a cast of a giant Torvosaurus skull, failed to bid higher than $2,800, far less than a smaller Majungasaurus skull cast! Perhaps no one had space to carry it onto their drive or plane ride home!

On the morning of October 21, I once again broke with personal tradition by attending the tyrannosaur talks at the beginning of the Theropods session, if only because the speakers involved were invested in the general problem of identifying species in the fossil record, one of my favorite subjects A mostly qualitative and highly controversial (if attendee reactions were an indication) reintepretation of a previously described Tyrannosaurus rex specimen from Elephant Butte, New Mexico (Nick Longrich, filling in for Sebastian Dalman) was bookmarked by more quantitative analyses of the smaller, earlier taxon Daspletosaurus (Colton Coppock focusing on maxillae, Thomas Carr focusing on the splenial and lacrimal). Following this was a reassessment of the purported theropod taxon “Bagaraatan ostromi” (Justyna Slowiak-Morkovina), a chimera of remains from a caenagnathid oviraptorosaur (Elmisaurus rarus) a juvenile tyrannosaurid (likely Tyrannosaurus/Tarbosaurus bataar). I intermittently visited the Afrotheria & Mammal Macroevolution session to listen to talks on the timing of placental ecological radiation in the late Maastrichtian-early Paleocene (David Grossnickle), the taphonomy of proximal versus distal sedimentary environments in Cretaceous-Paleogene western North American basins (Grace Pizzini), the biostratigraphic placement of a Miocene assemblage at Mission Pit, South Dakota (Gavin Davidson), and a proposal for a project on testing landscape and biotic coevolution in North America before and after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (Luke Weaver). Later, the Marine Mammals & Bats session had compelling talks on the recent extinction of the sea mink in northeastern North America (Alexis Mychajliw), basilosaurid ontogeny (Abdullah Gohar), Fourier elliptical analyses of cetacean teeth (Nick Brand), squalodontid phylogeny (Margot Nelson), and waipatiid phylogeny (Robert Boessenecker). I only returned to the “Theropod” session twice that day, first to see an interpretation of swim traces from a latest Maastrichtian tracksite in Bolivia (Roger Clawson); and later to see James Napoli’s capstone discussion on the problems of recognizing cryptic species in the non-avian dinosaur record, which recycled susbtantial material from his contentious Romer Prize talk last year on the use of qualitative versus quantitative morphological data in distinguishing ontogenetic trajectories of closely related crocodilian species.

At the awards banquet, I sat with Thomas Carr and his large group of undergraduate students, Melanie During, and Dava Butler. Carr and I had a vibrant discussion on Napoli’s “cryptic species” talk and Alexander Ruebenstahl’s presentation on Velociraptor alpha taxonomy (which I missed, but apparently overlapped in content and style with Napoli’s), as well as specimens his crew found during fieldwork in eastern Montana. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy the late-night conference afterparty, aside from a mandatory group photo with past and current UW paleontologists (Figure 9). My bus ride to Pittsburgh was rescheduled from 9 AM the next morning to 5 AM, and I desperately need to get at least a nap before the day-long journey.

I headed to Pittsburgh for a two-day collections visit (October 23-24) at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM), to see more earliest Paleocene “archaic ungulate” material from Montana (Figure 10). This time, the specimens under study were from the very productive but undescribed Constenius Locality in Garfield County, where I’m conducting fieldwork for my dissertation. The fifteen CM specimens were found in 1993 by John, Leona, and Kurt Constenius, for whom the site is named after. Constenius was then visited in 1996-1997 by the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), which uncovered over 190 specimens. Don Lofgren and Bill Clemens soon discovered that for two “archaic ungulate” jaw specimens, the CM and UCMP obtained different pieces of the same jaw! Clemens and Mary Dawson worked out a deal inspired by US Treausry “full value” rules for damaged dollar bills, with CM keeping the jaw for which they already had more than 50%, and likewise for the UCMP. For the record, UW has been collecting at Constenius since 2012, and now has a collection of 226 specimens, more than the CM and UCMP collections combined!

I made preliminary notes and photographs of the CM Constenius mammalian material before loaning them long-term to UW for my dissertation research. I also took note of 206 specimens in the CM’s Bug Creek Anthills collection, procured by Sloan & Van Valen’s SPSM/UM expeditions and a later unspecified Texas Tech University crew; these may be of interest as comparative material later in my dissertation’s development. Special thanks to curator Amy Henrici for her hospitality during my visit to the collections.

Figure 10. Right: My workstation in the “little bone room” (the paleomammalogy collection) at the Carnegie Museum. The skull hung on the wall is of a male giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus). Left: CM 96548, an “archaic ungulate” dentary from Constenius provisionally assigned to Mimatuta, though I suspect it and another Constenius specimen in the UW collections represent a new taxon. During my initial examination, I was pleasantly surprised to find this specimen has a unerupted third premolar (P₄), meaning it wasn’t fully grown when it died! This is important, as juvenile specimens of early Paleocene placentals are extremely rare.

On the afternoon of October 24, I attended the SVP online business meeting via Zoom, hosted by current society president Margaret Lewis. I was shocked to learn the Cincinnati meeting had at least 1,085 in-person attendees and 702 abstracts, the largest since the 2018 meeting in Albuquerque! By contrast, the 2022 Toronto meeting had only 853 in-person attendees and 658 abstracts. Perhaps my expectations were distorted by the fact that the Toronto meeting was packed into at a smaller venue (the Westin Harbour Castle), was attended by more of my international colleagues (especially those from Europe, such as the student and postdoc body of the PalM working group) and had the novelty of being the first in-person meeting post-COVID. Whereas the Cincinnati meeting frequently felt sparsely attended in the larger venue, which was especially felt during the Benefit Auction; and the conference as a whole felt more North America-centric and particularly USA-centric.

Still, this year’s adventures in vertebrate paleontology before, during, and after the SVP meeting were well worth it. First, the collections visits to the CMC and CM permitted much needed progress in obtaining data and evaluating future goals for dissertation research. Second, attending the conference in-person provided a much-needed social outlet to catch up with my closest acquaintances in the field as well as forge new professional and personal connections. I’m especially thankful for my conversations with Samantha van Mesdag, Russel Engelman, Hayley Orlowski, Anne Kort, Henry Fulghum, Zhexi Luo, Jessica Theodor, Stephen Chester, Anessa DeMers, James Napoli, Akinobu Watanabe, Nick Brand, Thomas Carr, Luke Weaver, Michael Pittman, Hila Chase, Matthew Jones, Natasha Vitek, Allison Nelson, Alexandra Pamfile, Jaelyn Eberle, Owen Goodchild, Guillermo Rougier, Luke Holbrook, and John Scannella. Third, seeing scientific debates play out in real time during Q&A sessions and evening dinners allowed me to track both emerging and persistent trajectories in the field in a more tangible manner than any cursory skim of the most recent peer-reviewed literature. For example, one of the surprises for me this year, which became evident during my conversation with Carr concerning Longrich, Napoli, and Ruebenstahl’s presentations (among other taxonomically minded talks in the theropod session), was seeing a resurgence of philosophical tension between proponents of phenetic (purely similarity-based) and phylogenetic (genealogical) species concepts, decades after the phylogenetic concept supposedly won in both neontology and paleontology. Ironically, issues in the methodology of morphological phylogenetics (for the purposes of constructing original trees, rather than mapping characters onto existing trees as in many a Romer Prize talk) appeared muted outside of the actinopterygian session and the theropod flight origins symposium. 3D imaging, modeling, and reconstruction were another, arguably more pleasantly progressive “hot topic”, as evidenced by Avrahami, Baird, and Sereno’s abstracts on the latest virtual software in the 21^st century paleontologist’s toolkit. It is abundantly clear new technologies are mandatory for studying old bones, and that one needs to evolve with the time to keep up with the pace of this field!

Jacqueline Silviria is a PhD student at the Department of Earth & Space Science and the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, University of Washington, Seattle. She can be reached at jsilvi@uw.edu.

If you know anything about the whereabouts of misplaced SPSM and UM placental material from Bug Creek Anthills, Harbicht Hill, and Purgatory, please contact the Vertebrate Paleontology Collections staff at the CMC (Glen Storrs, gstorrs@cincymuseum.org; Cameron Schwalbach, cschwalbach@cincymuseum.org).

Footnotes

1. This overview does not cover the virtual component of SVP 2023 hosted by the Sternberg Museum of Natural History on October 26-29; I only briefly tuned in on the first day. See Mickey Mortimer’s article for the weaknesses of this year’s virtual platform compared to the 2020 and 2021 meetings.

2. I had obtained a complete catalog of the specimens from UM professor David Fox, who sent it to me in 2018 while they were supposedly still at the Bell Museum, and I was collecting occurrence data for my Master’s thesis on earliest Paleocene placental biogeography at the University of New Mexico.

3. Apparently, the fate of these specimens and others like them is the subject of lore within the vertebrate paleontological community. During a conference afterparty event, one colleague half-joked to me that UM placental and multituberculate specimens were being kept in Robert Sloan’s house and were accidentally thrown out when he passed away in 2019. Another rumor is that Van Valen loaned and then lost “archaic ungulate” material from the Mantual Lentil Quarry collected by Glenn Jepsen and reposited at Princeton University; however, my communications with current and former University of Chicago and Field Museum faculty, as well as my personal observations back in 2018, indicate any and all Princeton University material Van Valen loaned from Jepsen made it to its current repository at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.