UCMP’s summer adventures (cont.)(page 5 of 5) |
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would be significant. The bones were located, but they were
not in good condition. In addition, excavation proved to be impossible, so the crew returned to
the familiar Bridger-Edgar area of Montana. Portions of two tenontosaurs found the previous summer were
collected. The somewhat jumbled but very well preserved bones of at least one juvenile tenontosaur were also collected.
And Staying Closer to Home... While others traveled elsewhere for their research this summer, Audrey Aronowsky and Jane Mason stayed closer to home to work on a new research project. It involves investigating behavior in the fossil record, in particular the behavior of burrowing organisms that preserve as trace fossils. Fossil burrows are difficult to study for several reasons: (1) they often branch at strange angles that make burrow morphology difficult to reconstruct, and (2) recognition depends on either an infilling of an empty |
burrow that is distinctive, or
some trace of a burrow wall that was cemented or maintained in some way by the inhabitant.
Audrey and Jane spent several days at the Bodega Marine Lab working on the muddy sandflats to make plaster
casts of burrows of polychaete worms and mud shrimp. Then by excavating these casts they have been able to
provide three-dimensional replicas to be used in a comparative study of fossil burrows.
Carole Hickman and UCMP Research Associate Carol Tang (California Academy of Sciences) organized a Molluscan
Paleoecology Symposium for the Annual Meeting of the Western Society of Malacologists, held at Asilomar, July
20-23. Graduate Student Audrey Aronowsky was one of eleven speakers in the Symposium, and UCMP Director David
Lindberg was an invited speaker in a Symposium on Molluscan biogeography.
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