Dragged deeper into winter...

8 December 2008. IVPP, Beijing, China

After a weekend of intense fever, I arrived at my desk this morning feeling a bit wobbly and dehydrated.

Who knew it would be so cold?

[looking southeast from the IVPP, into the rising sun at 0715]

The sky is cloudier today than it has been in the past few days. Perhaps we will get some snow soon. Maybe snow will make it better; at least then I will admit I am not in Los Angeles anymore.

I got some thermals because the infinite layers of T-shirts don't keep me warm anymore.

Jack

That is so 2007

2 December 2008. IVPP, Beijing.

Taking a break from writing a paper, I took some unsorted fossils collected from last year and cleaned them. What I did not realize was that while some of these were recovered from the great flood of Hezheng in 2007, others were from the Inner Mongolia locality Baogeda Ula.

[a rhino wrist bone and a antelope horncore from the late Miocene Shengou locality. These specimens were buried in mud in the Hezheng collection and subsequently recovered along with fish fossils]

These are glimpses of what we hope to find during our 2009 Inner Mongolia excavation project; hopefully everything we collect will be more complete and more diverse.

Other than the occasional interruption by graduate students asking me to help translate their Chinese abstracts, research is going well. However, there are simply too many fossils in this building. There is always something I have not seen before, and is worth a look when I walk by someone's office.

This American Life in Beijing

I think there was an official moment over the weekend when I finally realized what I represent.

The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology has recruited a handful of post-doctoral researchers from outside China in the past two years. The result is the residency of two French post-docs, a Japanese, a Canadian, and a British researcher.

For some reason the Americans (I am referring to U.S. researchers) come and go, and never stay long. At most the IVPP would have all of its former students and research associates who have left China for positions in the U.S. come for meetings and presentations.

So I have somehow become "the American" among the graduate students.

I am sure everything I do adds to their image of an American life: I wake up to jog around Beijing at 6 am; I wear flip-flops in winter; I drink fat-free milk in the morning; I just bought a guitar and I jam in my room.

I know English.

I have been working with half a dozen or so graduate students on translating their abstracts and helping with research methodology more commonly used in the U.S. You can even say that this is my "Fulbright moment", my role as a representative of an American student in a Chinese institution has become very clear.

I think that means I need to get to work! It dawned on me that this is a daunting job.

Jack