#microfossil — Public Fediverse posts

Dr Erica Barlow picked up a rock by chance 10 years ago. It might hold the oldest form of complex life on Earth https://news.unsw.edu.au/en/erica-picked-up-a-rock-10-years-ago-it-might-hold-the-oldest-form-of-complex-life-on-earth

Distinctive #microfossil supports early #Paleoproterozoic rise in complex cellular organisation https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gbi.12576

"the age estimate coincides with the #GreatOxidationEvent... The sharp rise of oxygen has been linked to the development of complex life on Earth, but we haven’t had the fossil record to demonstrate this – until now."

Many people think the history of the Earth is hard to decipher. The geological record jumbles everything up. We set out to fact-check this in my ERC Starting Grant MindTheGap. Focusing on the mode of evolution, because that is something that we can only glean from long records, longer than anything accessible to observation or experimentation today.

Thanks to collaboration with Peter Burgess we used forward models to simulate formation of carbonate rocks and see how completeness and stratigraphic resolution affect the reconstructions. Guess what! The geological record is 👌🏻 With a bit of understanding of #sedimentology and #physics we can test is with computer experiments and it turns out even very patchy rock strata will let us reconstruct the correct mode of evolution. This opens a lot of possibilities, especially for the #microfossil community: your data is priceless to understand #microevolution.

Check out the results at https://lnkd.in/eeiSuRwP

Also a big shoutout to an excellent review process at PCI Paleo, the thoughtful editors and reviewers, and to the lead author Niklas Hohmann for #code #reproducibility effort that meets the most stringent standards. Check out our software at https://lnkd.in/eJkwhhuh

#evolution #paleontology #paleobiology #UtrechtUniversity

Meet me at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft (PalGes) in Jena, Germany. Sept. 18-22, 2023 #foraminifera #microfossil #fossil #paleontology #micropaleontology #Jurassic #Paleogene #Cretaceous

#Plankton evidence reveals a seasonally ice-free ocean during the Last Interglacial https://phys.org/news/2023-08-plankton-evidence-reveals-seasonally-ice-free.html #protists #forams

A seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean during the Last #Interglacial: Flor Vermassen et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01227-x

"A subpolar species associated with #Atlantic water expanded far into the #Arctic Ocean during the #LastInterglacial, analysis of #microfossil content of #SedimentCores reveals. This implies that summers in the #Arctic were ice free during this period."

When was the first time life began to prey on each other? https://phys.org/news/2022-12-life-began-prey.html

A case for an active #eukaryotic marine #biosphere during the #Proterozoic era: Lisa Eckford-Soper et al. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2122042119

"We use a size- & trait-based ecosystem model to show that the #microfossil record is most compatible with an active #eukaryote #ecosystem conducting #osmotrophy, #photosynthesis, #phagotrophy. Marine #ecosystems 1,700-780 Ma were far more active, diverse than generally thought."

@miekeroth Fascinating! Have you ever been interested in marine #microfossil structure, namely #foraminifera and #pteropods? I'm am a #paleoclimatologist and there are a lot of climate related questions that may be tackled with ability to print 3-D structures of those organisms.