#conodonts — Public Fediverse posts

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 🔬. 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 💎 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

#FossilSunday in one of the two fossiliferous localities of 🇳🇱. #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 👩🏼‍🏫 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 🇬🇧 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.