Congratulations to Nick Famoso who successfully defended his dissertation on Friday March 10th! Nick is now off to John Day Fossil Beds National Monument where he has been the Chief of Paleontology and Museum Curator since November 1st. 
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Horses of Paisley Cave
Congratulations to Dr. Davis and lab alumna Brianna McHorse who’s paper on identifying the horses from Paisley Cave came out earlier this week. The paper was covered by the University of Oregon in an Around the O article. You can find the article here.
Two More Senior Theses Presented!
Congratulations to our two remaining seniors who presented their senior theses this week! Eva Biedron successfully defended her senior thesis on fossil squirrels from a middle Miocene site in central Oregon through the Clark Honors College on Monday. Selina Robson presented her senior thesis to the Department of Geological Sciences on a new species of Miocene hyena from Kyrgyzstan today. Congratulations to both of them for finishing their degrees! Eva will be headed off to Vanderbilt University to work on her masters while Selina will be heading to the University of Calgary to work on hers!
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.
Two Presidential Undergraduate Research Scholars in the vert paleo group
Congratulations to Selina and Kendra on being part of the first cohort of Presidential Undergraduate Research Scholars! They’ll be supported by the program in pursuing their thesis projects next year. You can read more about it here.
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.
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