latest news
THESIS SUBMISSION! (JUNE 2022)
Congratulations to Ben Tindal, who submitted his completed PhD thesis in early June! Ben's project has explored the geological constraints on Neoproterozoic glacial episodes, and amongst other things includes a critical review of the sedimentological evidence for all pre-Pliocene glacial deposits in Scotland. He has secured a job with Natural England, and we all wish him luck as he starts his new position.
NAMIBIAN FIELDWORK (JUNE 2022)
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Will, Brennan and Alex recently completed four weeks of fieldwork on the sedimentology and depositional environments of the late Ediacaran Nama Group, Namibia. In addition to gathering data that will enable us to conduct full facies analyses of the siliclastic units containing fossils of soft-bodied organisms throughout the Nama Group, we also discovered new fossil specimens (including novel taxa), logged new sections, and initiated collaborations with the Geological Survey of Namibia. Brennan also found one of the most beautiful Rangea specimens you will ever see (now housed in the Museum of the Geological Survey of Namibia, Windhoek, specimen GSM F1726)!
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WELCOME TO BRENNAN O'CONNELL! (april 2022)
Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Brennan O'Connell has arrived to start her 3-year position examining the sedimentological context for late Ediacaran macrofossil assemblages, following the completion of her PhD at the University of Melbourne. Her first task will be to prepare for our first project field campaign, to the Nama Group of Namibia in late May 2022. Welcome to the group Brennan!
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Phil, Cat and Brennan enjoying the Ediacaran geology and beautiful views of Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire.
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Paper publications and conference PRESENTATIONS (December 2021)
Over the past term, there have been several successes for lab group members. Katie Delahooke presented her research on Ediacaran "conga lines" at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting in December. Meanwhile Phil Vixseboxse saw his first first-author publication published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences. That paper stems from work he completed prior to joining the lab, investigating the causes of observed fossil orientations of Ediacaran taxa in Newfoundland, Canada. Congratulations Katie and Phil!
Vixseboxse, P.B., Kenchington, C.G., Dunn, F.S. and Mitchell, E.G. (2021) Orientations of Mistaken Point fronds indicate morphology impacted ability to survive turbulance. Frontiers in Earth Sciences, 9, 762824. doi: 10.3389/feart.2021.762824
Vixseboxse, P.B., Kenchington, C.G., Dunn, F.S. and Mitchell, E.G. (2021) Orientations of Mistaken Point fronds indicate morphology impacted ability to survive turbulance. Frontiers in Earth Sciences, 9, 762824. doi: 10.3389/feart.2021.762824
welcome to our new lab members! (october 2021)
Our Leverhulme Research Project Grant, titled: "Establishing the environmental context for Earth’s first ‘mass extinction’", has finally started! This collaborative project between Alex Liu, Sean McMahon (Edinburgh), William McMahon (Cambridge), and Dima Grazhdankin (Novosibirsk) will investigate sedimentary successions in Russia, Namibia and Canada to evaluate the depositional environments in which Ediacaran macrofossils occur. Our two PhD students, Phil Vixseboxse and Catherine Boddy, arrived to start their projects this week!
MAPPING THE PALAEOLATITUDINAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE EDIACARAN MACROBIOTA (August 2021)
A paper arising from Catherine Boddy's undergraduate Masters project has been published in the Journal of the Geological Society. In collaboration with Dr Emily Mitchell and Dr Andrew Merdith (Leeds), Cat collated data on the geographical distribution of all documented Ediacaran macrofossils, and plotted their occurrences through time on leading palaeogeographic reconstructions for the late Ediacaran. She then used statistical analyses to test the strength of observed trends, noting that although the Ediacaran macrobiota as a whole have a broad global spatial distribution, those taxa considered the leading candidates for bilaterian animals are found only at low palaeolatitudes when they first appear in the fossil record after 560 million years ago.
Boddy, C.E., Mitchell, E.G., Merdith, A. and Liu, A.G. (2021) Palaeolatitudinal distribution of the Ediacaran macrobiota.
Journal of the Geological Society, doi: 10/1144/jgs2021-030
Boddy, C.E., Mitchell, E.G., Merdith, A. and Liu, A.G. (2021) Palaeolatitudinal distribution of the Ediacaran macrobiota.
Journal of the Geological Society, doi: 10/1144/jgs2021-030
Resolving the phylogenetic position of charnia masoni (july 2021)
A study led by Dr Frankie Dunn, and involving collaborators from Novosibirsk, Bristol, and the British Geological Survey, assesses the developmental biology of the Ediacaran rangeomorph Charnia masoni. Published in Science Advances, the paper recognises sympodial growth within Charnia, discusses homology between Ediacaran frondose taxa, and combines morphological and developmental data to place Charnia within a phylogenetic framework, identifying it (and by implication all rangeomorphs) as a stem-eumetazoan.
Dunn, F.S., Liu, A.G. et al. (2021) The developmental biology of Charnia and the eumetazoan affinity of Ediacaran rangeomorphs.
Science Advances, 7, eabe0291. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe0291
Dunn, F.S., Liu, A.G. et al. (2021) The developmental biology of Charnia and the eumetazoan affinity of Ediacaran rangeomorphs.
Science Advances, 7, eabe0291. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe0291
pre-gaskiers ediacaran macrofossils (april 2021)
During fieldwork on the Bonavista Peninsula of Newfoundland in 2019, Alex Liu and Ben Tindal found specimens of the late Ediacaran taxon Palaeopascichnus in siltstones directly beneath the Trinity diamictite - a glacial unit that is correlative to the Gaskiers Formation. These fossils are the oldest Ediacara-type macrofossils to be reported from Newfoundland.
Liu, A.G. and Tindal, B.H. (2021) Ediacaran macrofossils prior to the ~580 Ma Gaskiers glaciation in Newfoundland, Canada.
Lethaia, 54, 260–270. doi: 10.1111/let.12401
Liu, A.G. and Tindal, B.H. (2021) Ediacaran macrofossils prior to the ~580 Ma Gaskiers glaciation in Newfoundland, Canada.
Lethaia, 54, 260–270. doi: 10.1111/let.12401
WWW.EDIACARAN.ORG OUTREACH WEBSITE
The group maintains a website, www.Ediacaran.org, that is dedicated to promoting and sharing information on Ediacaran fossils and research. The website was founded in 2012, and is undergoing a major content overhaul.
