Tidbits

 
Welcome to our new grad students!

To the Caldwell Lab:
Maya deVries joins us from UC Davis and is interested in functional morphology, biomechanics, and macroevolution. This semester, she will be focusing on the biomechanics of the mantis shrimp’s spearing strike.

To the Padian Lab:
Brian Swartz joins us from Cambridge University where he received a Masters working on early ray-finned fishes. Here at Berkeley, Brian will be focusing on Eusthenopteron and the transition to land.

Congratulations!

To Diane Erwin who was elected Chairperson of the Paleobotanical Section of the Botanical Society of America for 2005-2006.
To Samantha Hopkins and Edward Davis, both of whom are officially new Ph.D.s as of this semester.
To Sharon Moshel-Lynch and her husband Tim on the birth of their daughter, Rebecca Erin. Sharon also received an Imperilled Collection Grant from the University of California’s Genetic Resources Conservation Program. The grant will allow Sharon to catalog and preserve the museum’s collection of approximately 1,400 sponges collected by museum alumnus Scott Nichols.
To Andrew Lee and Matt Wedel who have each received grants from the Jurassic Foundation. These grants

 

will support their continued research: Drew, on histological differences in the limb bones of bipedal and quadrupedal dinosaurs, and Matt, on skeletal pneumaticity in dinosaurs and birds.
To Jann Vendetti who received two grants: one from the Malacological Society of London and another from the Lerner-Gray Fund for Marine Research at the AMNH. Both will help fund her investigations into buccinid gastropod evolution.

Recent Research News

Tony Barnosky, Marc Carrasco, and Edward Davis in the August issue of PLoS Biology report that the species-area relationship influences estimates of paleo-biodiversity more than has previously been recognized. This discovery has broad implications for understanding major ecological, evolutionary, and extinction events in the history of life.
Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries opened this month at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. One of the exhibits features pachycephalosaur cranial histology and new interpretations regarding head-butting behavior, based on recent research by Mark Goodwin and John Horner, Museum of the Rockies.
Randall Irmis and alumnus Sterling Nesbitt have shown that Revueltosaurus callenderi, a Triassic animal thought to be an early ornithischian dinosaur, is instead an early relative of crocodilians.

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October, 2005