• 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
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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
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