This year’s Vertebrate Paleontology Workshop Meeting (Arbeitskreis Wirbeltierpaläontologie) is taking place at our Museum and we were there to help them empty some glassware. Steffi, Vincent, Fernando, and Jijia will all be presenting this weekend. And Bibi got roped into moderating Sunday morning at 9am 🥳.
Amniota lab postdoc Roberto Rozzi has just published a paper in Science! Rozzi et al. 2023 Dwarfism and gigantism drive human-mediated extinctions on islands. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add8606 Islands often contain distinctive ecological conditions that can lead to unusual evolutionary trajectories such as dwarf mammoths and giant rats. Rozzi et al. looked across extant and extinct species from islands … More Dwarfs and Giants in Science
Marianne Brasil (UC Berkeley) is visiting this week to work on the hominin material from the middle Atbara in Sudan. Stay tuned for a publication (or two) on the Atbara fauna soon.
Former Amniota Lab member Khalafallah Salih (PhD 2018) has been featured in Nature’s Career Q&A section https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00692-z
Our own Roberto Rozzi (Humboldt & DFG Postdoc) has been appointed Curator of the Geo-paleontological Collection and the Geiseltal Collection at the Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen museum at the Martin-Luther University in Halle (Germany). Congratulations Roberto!
Iris Menendez (PhD Complutense Univ., Madrid, Spain) joined our lab as an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow on March 1st. Her project, Unveiling the role of morphological and ecological evolution in the rodent radiation, will examine the the role of ecological opportunity in generating morphological diversity in rodents, and on the geological and ecological drivers … More Iris Menendez joins Amniota Lab
The ERC Project PALEONILE officially began on December 1st 2022, and the first field season of the project took place from 22 Jan – 17 Feb 2023. Our team (headed by Faysal Bibi) conducted a long survey along the Blue and White Nile rivers in Sudan in search for paleontological sites. Read more about PALEONILE … More ERC Project PALEONILE Successful First Field Season in Sudan
On Feb 20th Till Ramm successfully defended his Ph.D. Quaternary diversity dynamics of Australian reptiles, at the Humboldt University, under the joint supervision of Johannes Müller and Jane Melville (Monash University, Australia). Summa cum laude. Congratulations Till!
Johannes was part of a team that published a study on the relationship between body size and mean annual temperature in PNAS. The study used both modern and fossil turtles, including from the Shungura Formation of southern Ethiopia. Parker et al. 2022. The utility of body size as a functional trait to link the past … More Paper on Turtle Body Size in PNAS
Museum frogs meet the latest in integrative species delimitation in Alice Petzold‘s postdoc project
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