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Emilia Jarochowska ๐บ๐ฆ๐ฑAn anonymous 1st student gave me a Christmas card inspired by what we covered this year in my course: ๐ด horse #evolution and.... #conodonts. I swear I had not been even trying to spread conodont propaganda, but this student saw right through me and painted them as northern lights on a Christmas sky. This is the most glorious conodont representation so far! ๐ (yes I melted)
It's very satisfying to see the crown article of my first PhD student Bryan Shirley published! Skeleton is usually all that remains from an animal in the fossil record, so in order to find out how the animal functioned when alive, we have to squeeze out clues from the skeletal tissues, for example using advanced #ElectronMicroscopy ๐ฌ. We were told that vertebrate tissues are too chemically unstable to study this way, but with the help of experts in microscopy, we were able to make rapid measurements of crystallography in the oldest #vertebrate hashtag#teeth to understand how they function evolved. Turns out the crystal orientation reflects the function! From the #ultrastructure we can estimate how the animals were biting and see their evolutionary adaptations at the level of individual crystals ๐ This was possible thanks to the facilities and funding by EXCITE network and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation
Now published #OpenAccess at https://rdcu.be/dLpbD
#UtrechtUniversity #evolution #biomineralization #paleontology #paleobiology #conodonts
Penny Richardsstarted a #Wikipedia article on #USGS scientist Anita G. Epstein Harris (1937-2014), inventor of the Conodont Alteration Index: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_G._Harris @wikiwomeninred #WomeninSTEM #Brooklyn #OhioStateU #geology #paleontology #conodonts
jakalopesAwesome fossil stamps I received from Canada! The conodonts one is so cool - they were jawless vertebrates kind of like hagfish. Parts of their "teeth" are found as fossils. #postcrossing #stamps #fossils #conodonts #biology
#FossilSunday in one of the two fossiliferous localities of ๐ณ๐ฑ. #Triassic #ichnofossils aka #TraceFossils in a marginal marine warm lagoon that once stretched here and hosted nothosaurs, sharks, bony fish and, hopefully, also #conodonts
Scientist's life is: hardly being able to sleep from excitement. This week we kicked off not one, but TWO new projects with two new team members. The second one will be experimental #diagenesis in #foraminifera, which are widely used for #climate reconstructions. They record the #isotope composition of the seawater in which they lived, but that composition may be altered after their death - we will try to reproduce this experimentally in the lab as part of a nessc.nl project. I started a #palaeontology BSc course ๐ฉ๐ผโ๐ซ by incorporating analytical methods and teaching students documentation of their analyses by using #RMarkdown. It is an attempt to change the perception of #palaeontology from descriptive and exploratory to a more hypothetico-deductive and quantitative field. And I finished at the Uni of Leicester ๐ฌ๐ง with the big honour of examining a PhD candidate who epitomized this approach by establishing a quantitative proxy for the trophic level of #conodonts and possibly any #invertebrates with dental tools. And that's just the highlights. It's a big privilege to be a scientist.
Kenneth De BaetsUpper Norian #conodonts from the Baoshan block, western Yunnan, southwestern China, and implications for #conodont turnover: https://peerj.com/articles/14517/ via @PeerJ #Biodiversity #EvolutionaryStudies #Paleontology
#Paleobiology
Upper Norian conodonts from the Baoshan block, western Yunnan, southwestern China, and implications for conodont turnover
The Sevatian of the late Norian is one of the key intervals in biotic turnover and in changes of paleoclimate and paleoenvironments. Conodont faunas recovered from two sections of upper Norian strata of the Dashuitang and Nanshuba formations near Baoshan City in western Yunnan province provide new insights into the diversity and biostratigraphy of the Sevatian conodonts within China as well as globally. A lower Mockina (M.) bidentata Zone and an upper Parvigondolella (P.) andrusovi Zone are identified in this area according to the first occurrences of M. bidentata and of P. andrusovi. Rich conodont fauna of M. zapfei is detailed and presents various intraspecific forms. A total of 19 forms of P1 elements are presented, which, when combined with the reported conodonts in the M. bidentata Zone, suggest that there was a peak in conodont diversity within the M. bidentata Zone. A biotic crisis in the uppermost M. bidentata Zone is recognized from the contrast between the diverse conodont fauna in the M. bidentata Zone and the rare conodonts in the P. andrusovi Zone. The conodont turnover during the middle Sevatian highlights the fact that the prolonged phases of the end-Triassic mass extinction probably began in the transition interval from M. bidentata Zone to P. andrusovi Zone.