During the week, the university has winter courses free to all, including courses on how to make fossil models, a course on the anatomy and behavior of sharks, one on foraminifers, and many more. Due to the amount of work I had to get done, I wasn't able to participate in all courses I wanteed to. I was able to take part in one course, taught by a post-docturate student who is mentored by Laura, Alexandre's wife who is also a professor at the University. The course was about how to train your thinking in the scientific method. The class was great, and we talked mostly about the deductive scientific method, widely used in science. She used a silent video of four  booklice: a bigger booklouse appeared on frame, and then three smaller oens followed, and seemed to push against the bigger one. Eventually, they gave up, then came another small booklouse and started pushing on the bigger one, pushing her in circles until she releases a liquid and the video ends. Suffice to say the whole class was very confused. The lecturer challenged us to formulate questions based on what we could see, not what we could infer. This was a brilliant way to understand the value of turning subjective observations into subjective questions, not letting your biases lead your thinking of what and how could be happening. 

As for my project, I was able to essentially finish measuring my pictures of spines on Fiji. When I believed I was truly done, I asked for Alexandre's opinion on something I was doing: using only the internal curvature of the spines and not fitting the curve to the tip, that often bent to the other side. He said that to measure the curvature, we should follow the spine morphology perfectly, even if the curve is not smooth. Which I supposed counteracted my original logic, and meant I would have to redo all curvature measures of the spines. I decided to leave that for next week, as there were other components of the project that needed my time and attention. I finished encasing femurs in resin to replace the ones that got damaged by the resin. That process took about two days of curing, and then about a whole day of evenly sawing them. Besides that, I decided it was finally time to look at the micro-CT scans and try my hand at separating the legs. Because we scanned many legs separatey (since they're small), we had to digitally separate them into different files to facilitate analyzing. Towards the end of the week, I decided to focus on filing the resin parts, since Alexandre was not around to help me with the software.