Congratulations to Danielle Oberg who successfully presented her senior research project today! She worked on the insectivores from Cave Basin, a new site in central Oregon. Good Work Danielle! Danielle will be headed off to East Tennessee State University to work on her masters this fall.
Author: Nick Famoso
Paper published on 50 million years of rhino arthritis
Lab alumna Kelsey Stilson and PI’s Drs. Hopkins and Davis published a paper today discussing the evolution of arthritis in rhinos in the open-access journal PLoS ONE. They found that with increased mass, adaptation to running, and increased life span, there is an increase in arthritis in the limb bones of rhinos. Congratulations on your paper!
Figure 1: Time-calibrated phylogeny of rhinocerotid taxa used in this study with outgroup H. eximius. The thicker bars indicate the actual first and last appearance data (FAD and LAD) of the fossil localities included, not the comprehensive range of the species. D. bicornis has no blue line because only modern bones were examined. Tree was pruned from Cerdeño’s 1998 morphologic phylogeny or Rhinocerotidae and time-calibrated in RStudio using the ‘equal’ setting in the function timePaleoPhy() in the software package ‘Paleotree’. Tree was set to be fully dichotomous and to extend all the way to the LAD.
New Species of Agriochoerid Named!
A new paper online early today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, written by grad student Meaghan Emery and PI’s Drs. Davis and Hopkins, named a new species of agriochoerid (clawed-oreodont) from the Hancock Mammal Quarry in eastern Oregon! They not only name the new species, but they also discuss variation and all of the reason why this is a new and different species. Check it out here. Congratulations on your good work!
FIGURE 1. Tooth rows from UOMNH specimens, and diagrams of tooth terminology. A, B, image and diagram of upper tooth row, a composite specimen with the M3 of F-28324, the M2 and M1 of F-27687, and the P1–P4 of F-27697; C, D, image and diagram of lower tooth row of UCMP V75203/196318. Abbreviations: alacr, anterolabial cristid; alicr, anterolingual cristid; ALC, anterolabial cone; as, anterior style; ci, cingulum; EC, entoconid; es, entostylid; HC, hypoconuid; HCL, hypoconulid; MC, metacone or metaconid; MCL, metaconule or metaconulid; MLAC, mesolabial cone or conid; MLIC, mesolingual cone or conid; mss, mesostyle or mesostylid; mts, metastyle or metastylid; PC, paracone or paraconid; pcr, protocristid; pes, pre-entostylid; placr, posterolabial cristid; PLIC, posterolingual cone; plicr, posterolingual cristid; pmcr, postmetaconulecrista; pos, posterior style; ppcr, postprotocrista; PrC, protocone or protoconid; prpcr, preprotocristid; ps, parastyle or parastylid; tcr, transverse cristid; trcro, transverse cristid oblique. Image D taken by Dave Strauss and released under a CC-BY 3.0 license. All scale bars equal 1 cm.
Fall Meetings
It has been a busy fall for the UO Paleontology lab. We had 5 poster and 3 oral presentations at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and Dr. Hopkins gave an oral presentation at the Geological Society of America meetings. Win McLaughlin also has a poster presentation on her work in Kyrgyzstan at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week. There will also be 3 poster and 1 oral presentations at the January 2016 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in Portland, Oregon. Go us!
Two New Grants
Congratulations to Dr. Davis who has brought two grants to the University of Oregon. The first one is a NSF Advancing Digitization of Biodiversity Collections grant for digitizing invertebrate fossils from the Cenozoic of the eastern Pacific and was awarded to several institutions, headed by the University of California Museum of Paleontology. The second is an EarthCube Grant awarded to the Neotoma Database for migrating data from other databases (e.g., MioMap) to Neotoma.
Back From the Field!
Drs. Hopkins and Davis, Nick, Kendra, and Danielle just returned from a successful two weeks of field work in Eastern Oregon! Liz White (our good friend and exhibit designer from the Museum) and Dr. Stephen Frost (Anthropology) joined for a couple of days as well. They explored the Crooked River area, John Day Basin, and localities near Madras, and brought back many new specimens to add to the Museum collections! Nick and a small field crew will be back out to the John Day Basin later this summer.
New Paper Published!
Grad student Nick Famoso and PI’s Edward Davis and Samantha Hopkins had a paper published online early today! The paper, titled “Are Hypsodonty and Occlusal Enamel Complexity Evolutionarily Correlated in Ungulates?,” was published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution. You may find a copy of the paper here. Congratulations to them and their two additional co-authors!
Fulbright Scholar : Win McLaughlin
Win McLaughlin was awarded a Fulbright Scholar position for 2015 to help further her research in Kyrgyzstan! She left in January 2015 to begin her 10 month stint preparing fossils in the capital of Bishkek and doing fieldwork (once the weather gets better) in the central part of the country. She is writing a blog about her experience which you can visit here.
Old News
December 2014
Nick Famoso and Meaghan Emery both were awarded the Doris O. and Samuel P. Welles Research Fund of the University of California Museum of Paleontology to advance their research!
September 2014
Dr. Hopkins, Win McLaughlin, Meaghan Emery, and Nick Famoso returned from field work in Kyrgyzstan!
February 2014
Nick Famoso, Dr. Hopkins, and Dr. Davis returned from the 10th NAPC which was held at the University of Florida. Despite snow storms, they all arrived in Florida and managed to have a great meeting.
Nick Famoso and Meaghan Emery both successfully passed their comprehensive exams!
May 2013
Another busy month in the Hopkins lab. Congratulations to our three graduating undergraduates: Amy Atwater, Brianna McHorse, and Kelsey Stilson have all successfully defended their honors theses, and everyone passed with distinction. Brianna McHorse was chosen as one of the Oregon Six at the UO, a group of the highest-achieving Phi Beta Kappa inductees for the year.
Meaghan Emery won the People’s Choice Award for her presentation in the UO Three-Minute Thesis competition, for which she received $200 and endless bragging rights; she also won first prize for her poster in the UO graduate research forum. At the UO Undergraduate Research Symposium, Savannah Olroyd presented a poster on variation in fossil beaver teeth and Brianna McHorse gave a talk on identifying isolated postcrania in the fossil record.
David Levering, lab graduate, will be leading a field crew this summer at Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument.
April 2013
April has been a big month for lab successes. Sam Hopkins went to a National Evolutionary Synthesis Center catalysis workshop, where research connections abound.
Win McLaughlin and Meaghan Emery, both PhD students, received Theodore Roosevelt travel grants from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. They plan to use this support to travel to the American Museum of Natural History for data collection this summer. John Jacisin III, a MS student, received a Geological Society of America grant for summer field research on John Day herps.
Savannah Olroyd won a prize for her fabulous poster about research on leafcutter ant behavior at the International Projects Fair.
Graduating senior Amy Atwater will be taking on a job as a Paleontologist/GIS Technician at Denali National Park in Alaska, where she’ll be doing plenty of fieldwork and hopefully not fighting off too many grizzly bears. Former Hopkins Lab PhD student John Orcutt has just accepted a postdoc at Cornell College (in Iowa), where he will be teaching undergraduate biology and getting some research done on Pleistocene biogeography.
March 2013
Brianna McHorse, a graduating senior in the lab, has received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation for her proposal, “Testing function in modern and fossil horses using three-dimensional musculoskeletal modeling.” Congratulations also to our graduate student Nick Famoso for receiving an Honorable Mention for his project, “Ecological response to catastrophic pyroclastic volcanic events in the fossil record of North America,” which will examine how diet, morphology, ecology, and aridity are affected by super-volcanic eruptions.
Win McLaughlin and Meaghan Emery have just returned from a collections research trip to the UCMP at Berkeley, where they photographed and measured many an oreodont and deer.
Samantha Hopkins was just named president of the Oregon Academy of Sciences at the annual meeting of the OAS in Salem, at Willamette University. It was announced that the University of Oregon will host next year’s meeting of the OAS, offering an opportunity to showcase our research to the Oregon research community.
February 2013
Samantha Hopkins just received word that her proposal to the NSF, addressing macroevolutionary patterns of diet and diversification in mammals, has been funded. This grant will accelerate our research into the role ecology plays in driving patterns of mammalian diversification.
Win McLaughlin has officially advanced to PhD candidacy by passing her comprehensive exams.
January 2013
Edward Davis has returned from the International Biogeography Society conference, where he co-organized a symposium titled “The convergence of conservation paleontology and biogeography.” The symposium showcased the innovative research of several paleobiologists, highlighting the need for a deep-time perspective to answer questions of organisms’ response to changing environmental pressures.
You must be logged in to post a comment.