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. 
research
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.
Dr. Meaghan Emery-Wetherell
Congratulation to Meaghan Emery-Wetherell who successfully defended her dissertation this morning! She worked on understanding variation in even-toed ungulates (Artiodactyla) and specifically looked at the extinct group known as oreodonts. Good job on your accomplishment! She will be moving to Central Washington University as an adjunct lecturer this fall.
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 on new late Hemingfordain site published!
Congratulations to Win McLaughlin and Dr. Hopkins on the release of their paper, “A new late Hemingfordian vertebrate fauna from Hawk Rim, Oregon, with implications for biostratigraphy and geochronology” online early today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology! This is the first publication from Win’s masters thesis work. Check out the paper here.
FIGURE 3. Simplified stratigraphic column as seen in the Main outcrop locality of Hawk Rim. All other localities are correlated to this stratigraphy, as shown on the right. Stratigraphic ranges of taxa taken for all localities.
New paper on enamel complexity and body size in horses!
Congratulations to Nick Famoso and Edward Davis who’s paper, “On the relationship between enamel band complexity and occlusal surface area in Equids (Mammalia, Perissodactyla),” came out today in the journal PeerJ. They used fractals to quantify enamel band complexity on the chewing surface of horse teeth and investigated the relationship between complexity and body size while accounting for phylogeny. They found that as horses get bigger, their teeth become less complex! You may view the paper here.
Figure 4: Phylogeny used in this study with continuous characters, tooth area and fractal dimensionality (D), mapped onto the tree. This tree is a time-scaled (Ma) informal supertree. Characters were mapped using the contMap function in the phytools package version 0.4–45 (Revell, 2012) implemented in R. Length refers to the length of the legend in units of branch length. † = extinct taxon.
Another Thesis Presentation!
Congratulations to Kendra Walters who gave a wonderful presentation of her Senior Thesis yesterday. Her research focused on testing the Species-Energy hypothesis for mammals in the United States over the last century. Kendra will be heading off to UC Irvine this fall to start a PhD studying Microbiology.
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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