Identifying Fossil Wood

Hello! My name is Carolyn Thornton and I’m a recent graduate from the College of Wooster in Ohio and a new museum intern in paleobotany. I’ve already had the opportunity to work on projects with fossil wood and leaves from Central America, as well as modern fruits from the family Chrysobalanaceae. A 19 million years old version of these fruits was described by Chris Nelson for a Fossil Friday a few weeks ago.

We’ve made the most headway with the fossil wood project. The wood was collected from the Miocene of Panama at Lago Alajuela and we’re working to describe them in enough detail that we can identify them and use their features to understand paleoclimate. So far we’ve definitively identified one wood to the family level.

Fossil wood that would later be revealed to be a member of the family Elaeocarpaceae.

I started with a particularly well-preserved piece of fossil wood (above) and cut it so that we had the three views necessary to completely describe it.

Invertebrate- Silicone Molds

Hi my name is Aly Tucker and I am a new intern and I am studying invertebrates.  I graduated in May 2015 from UF with a B.S. in Geology and am excited for this opportunity.

During the first week, I prepped a numerous amount of specimens from Panama. I was also able to make a couple of silicone molds of gastropods. Silicone molds are beneficial because they give you a nice image of the specimen and can help accentuate details of the specimen that may be hard to see otherwise.

3D Digitization Workshop

This week I was lucky enough to have attended a workshop titled “3D Digitization of Fossils for Educators and Citizen Scientists”, organized by Claudia Grant. This workshop was attended by K12 teachers, researchers, and paleo club members, from all over the US. Justy and I were asked to give two half hour demos on using the Nextengine Surface Scanner, which took place on Monday and Tuesday morning. Overall, everyone was very receptive to our demos and many people had great ideas on how to take surface scanning a step further. I also attended many talks between the two days, all of which were incredibly interesting and insightful.  I learned about various 3D programs, 3D printing, and how to incorporate this technology into the classroom. A high school student named Sage, who attends a school in California in which Paleo lessons led by UF researchers have been taught, talked about how he was affected by these lessons and the use of 3D printed models during them. I think this was the most powerful talk of all because it gave the educators and researchers insight as to how to create a lasting effect on young people.

Nextengine Surface Scanning Demo         (Photo courtesy of Dawn Mitchell).

American Camel

It is most likely that every time we think of a camel the first thing that comes to our minds is a one hump mammal known as Camelus dromedarius walking in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

Picture taken from: http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Giza-Pyramids-with-Man-Leading-Two-Camels-Across-the-Desert-in-Egypt-Posters_i3257904_.htm

or the two hump camel known as Camelus bactrianus from Asia which we visit at the zoo. But besides that, this is what most of us really think of when we talk about camels.

SPNHC 2015!

This week the FLMNH hosted the annual Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections’ conference. I was lucky enough to be able to both volunteer at and attend the event.

All the Small Things

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on several smaller projects around the lab that have included identifying specimens from the Gatun formation, washing samples of Pacific Muck in the screen washing room, and unpacking specimen from several storage boxes in the lab.

Intro to Morphometrics and R

PCP-PIRE intern Justy Alicea measuring turtle skulls for his morphometric analysis

In order to tell whether the turtle skull I am studying is different than the skulls of modern relatives, I needed to run a morphometric analysis. This means I needed to take measurements of many different features on many different specimens and then analyze the relationships among those measurements. There are a few ways to do this. Traditionally, measurements of lengths, angles, masses, etc are taken and compared between a set of specimens. These measurements are essential and are the first step in studying variation in a species. We can use this data to understand development, as in a growth series, or population differentiation across space. The main challenge for interpreting these relationships is that most of these measurements are correlated, for example, forearm length will vary with the length of the humerus. In order to make these comparisons informative, we have to remove the effects of size. We do this by standardizing the data.  

As one may imagine, it is difficult to make comparisons as the data sets get larger and larger in terms of number of specimens and number of measurements. There are programs that can be used to help visually represent this variation. R is a statistical analysis program that allows you to write computer code to take the data and manipulate it in all kinds of ways. The manipulated data can be visually represented by any number of graphs and charts.  As in all code writing, there is a lot of going back and forth, fixing code errors that can be as small as a misplaced comma. I started by looking at box plots of my measurements to see where the greatest variation was and then looked over bivariate plots to see which pairs of measurements have most interesting or unexpected relationships.

I am still working my way through a great R tutorial created by DataCamp (www.datacamp.com) and hosted by the swirl project (www.swirlstats.com). It’s not easy but it’s not unlike learning how to use a suped-up scientific calculator. I still have a lot to learn but I can see the power of adding a program like R to my Paleo toolkit.

PCP PIRE Fall 2015 Museum Internship Application Now Available!

Spring-Summer museum intern Ariel Guggino examines leaf fossils in the paleobotany collections at FLMNH.

PCP PIRE’s museum internship application for Fall 2015 is now available!  Fall 2015 museum interns will be able to explore questions dealing with the paleobiology of the Neotropics at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Applicants interested in all aspects of paleontology including paleobotany, invertebrate paleontology, and vertebrate paleontology are encouraged to apply.

Spring-Summer museum intern Justy Alicea 3D scanning a fossil turtle skull.

This internship for undergraduates/post-baccalaureate students coincides with the University of Florida Fall Semester (August 24 – December 18). A monthly stipend is provided, as is assistance with locating housing in Gainesville, FL.  Applications are due July 1, 2015. Click here for application instructions.

Milly the Millipede

For the last few weeks Roger and I have been prepping out the millipede that was found by Aaron Wood in Panama. It went from about fifty percent covered in matrix and 100 percent covered in butvar to fully uncovered and exposed! It took about a week and a half of scraping with a pin vice and dental picks to remove all the unwanted material. In the middle of it I was also pulled away from work by a family emergency which slowed down the preparation immensely. Together with the millipede from Florida the Panamanian specimen will the be foundation to my paper.

Nebraska All Hands

Lately Ariel and myself have been working on identifying specimens that were recovered from the Nebraska All Hands trip last year. We have been identifying the taxon, the nature of the element, the side, and the tooth position of various different specimens. We are working with taxa ranging from Brontotheres to rodents.