38 million years ago, mammals native to South America began evolving teeth similar to the horses and camels in North America. Did they adapt to similar environments?
How do animals adapt?
Adaptations are evolutionary changes in an organism's behavior or anatomy that make it better suited to its environment. They are a product of natural selection, but figuring out why a particular adaptation evolved is a trickier question.
Most people hardly notice what's on the ground beneath their feet. But to researchers like Regan Dunn, a graduate student studying paleobotany at the University of Washington, fallen leaves provide invaluable clues to understanding how climate change impacted life on earth - and how our actions today will shape the future.
Regan is part of a team led by Caroline Strömberg, Burke Curator of Paleobotany, that is studying 40 to 18 million-year-old plant and animal fossils found in Patagonia, Argentina. “This was a time with major climate change and some extinction events, so we really want to understand how vegetation was affected by these changes.”
To understand the impact of climate change on Patagonia’s vegetation, they set out to reconstruct what types of vegetation existed in ancient Patagonia. To collect data, Regan visited Costa Rica - which has a modern climate similar to that of ancient Patagonia.
Do you want to work in the fossil collection of a museum and be surrounded by fossils all day? In this edition of Science Behind-the-Scenes, meet the people who work in the paleontology (fossil) collection, learn about what they study, and meet some of our favorite fossils!
We've got curators of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants, a fossil preparator, a handful of graduate students doing research and collection work, a legion of volunteers, scientists from the University of Washington and elsewhere doing research, and one collection manager to rule them all.
There's a lot going on! One of the most important jobs is keeping the fossils safe and organized. With this many fossils, if you put something in the wrong drawer it might be lost for years! (This is no exaggeration!) With good care and attention, the Burke's fossils will be available for research and exhibits forever. That's the goal of paleontology collection manager Ron Eng.
Caroline's favorite fossil: grass silica.
The Burke's curators are scientists and specialists in their field - for example Caroline Strömberg, curator of plant fossils, is a paleobotanist. She studies the evolution of grasslands (technically speaking, grass-dominated vegetation) during the last 70 million years and how it affected animals. Curators help the collection by being experts - they identify fossils, help interpret fossils for exhibits, and help manage the fossil collection. Caroline's favorite fossil? Microscopic minerals left over from prehistoric plants: "My favorite fossil in the Burke collection is early Miocene microscopic silica from grasses that reflect the earliest grasslands that spread in North America."
Fossil preparator Burce Crowley prepares fossils, which means removing them from rock and gluing them if necessary. His job fascinates just about everyone who visits Burke's Behind-the-Scenes tours and really deserves its own blog post (stay tuned!).
Jonathan's favorite: Geomyid skull and skeleton.
Graduate students from the University of Washington help with collection work (like organizing or numbering fossils) and use the collection for research. Graduate student Jonathan Calede from Dr. Greg Wilson's paleontology lab uses fossils in the Burke's collection to study the evolution of mammals. He looks at the teeth of fossil mammals and compares them to the teeth of mammals in the Mammalogy collection to figure out what extinct animals ate. Jonathan's favorite fossil at the Burke is a skeleton of a prehistoric pocket gopher, a Geomyid.
Bradon's favorite: an Antarctic crocodile femur.
Brandon Peecook from Dr. Chris Sidor's paleontology lab recently returned from fossil-hunting trips to Antarctica and Africa. He looks for fossils there to bring back to the Burke. He studies how different groups of animals are related to each other and how they evolved. This helps him understand the diversity of extinct ecosystems that we have no other way of reconstructing: "Currently my favorite fossil at the Burke is the half femur brought back from Antractica that may actually belong to an early relative of crocodilians - something totally unknown from Antarctica before our recovery of the specimen."
Stay tuned for more from Science Behind-the-Scenes! We'll take a look at Bruce Crowley's job and find out how you get fossils from the field (like in Antarctica!) to the museum.
Museum collections come from a variety of different sources. Sometimes they are donated by individuals and families, other times they are donated by other museums, cultural organizations or state agencies, and often, volunteers, researchers, and employees of the museum go out and collect themselves. These trips can take you down the street or around the world.
Regan Dunn, a UW graduate student who works in Burke Curator of Paleobotany Dr. Caroline Strömberg's lab, was in Costa Rica this summer conducting original research in the field. By looking at the shape of plant cells (phytoliths) and amount of sunlight those plants receives, Regan is trying to determine if there is a correlation between the two. By analyzing current ecological environments, Regan hopes to reconstruct and better understand past environments.
While Regan was in Costa Rica, Dr. Strömberg and Regan worked with the Burke Museum’s “Girls in Science” summer camp. Specifically, the girls examined phytoliths, learned about Paleoecology, and even conducted research on Tiger Mountain that replicated Regan’s field work. At the end of the day on the mountain, the girls came back to the Burke and talked with Regan about her research via Skype. They talked about what life in the field is like and even compared findings. Watch the video below to find out more – those rubber boots would work great for Seattle-based field work, too!
Whenever possible, I love to get out of my basement office and spend time in the Burke’s galleries. There are so many different things to see, and my curiosity still gets sparked from time to time. A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Burke lobby for our monthly Free First Thursday and talked with some of our docents about this interesting little creature.
This is a skull cast of Thrinaxodon liorhinus, a mammal-like reptile from the early Triassic (about 245 million years ago). Believed to be a “missing link” to mammals, this Therapsid was about the size of a cat. It was warm-blooded and had whiskers (if you look closely in the photo below, you can see holes in the skull where they would grow). Scientists also believe it had fur.
Although Thrinaxodons had mammal-like features and kind of resembles a beefed-up weasel, it also laid eggs and had scales.
So there you have it, another fascinating encounter with natural history. On the first Thursday of every month the Burke Museum is open until 8 pm and there are extra activities with Burke docents all day. If you come this Thursday, September 1st, you can see the Wolves and Wild Lands in the 21st Century exhibits before it closes on Labor Day, and perhaps you’ll have a Thrinaxodon moment too.
This month’s Volunteer Spotlight blog features Jeff Benca, a UW undergraduate student and volunteer in the Burke Museum’s Paleobotany division.
Jessica: How did you begin volunteering at the Burke?
Jeff: I started volunteering at the Burke back in high school for the arachnid collection with Rod Crawford. While spiders, insects, and reptiles were a major interest for me, I had thought that plants were rather boring until I started raising carnivorous plants. After I started working at the UW Botany Greenhouse before graduating from high school, I got particularly interested in early land plants and started building up a teaching and research collection of the most ancient group of vascular plants alive today: clubmosses. It was after I had started this collection that I met Dr. Caroline Strömberg, Burke Curator of Paleobotany. Through her I met another volunteer, Maureen Carlisle, who found plant fossils from a new fossil locality which included clubmosses and she was looking for someone that might be interested in describing these fossils. I happily got on board with describing clubmosses from this new fossil flora, which is what I do now at the Burke.
The work I do essentially allows me to be a perpetual kid – I get to work with ridiculously cool plants at the UW Botany Greenhouse, dig for fossils in near and far-off places while working with awesome fossil collections at the Burke. On top of this I actually get to grow plants that are extremely similar to the 390 million year-old fossils I study.
Jessica: What are you researching at the museum?
Jeff: I am studying clubmoss fossils found in northern Washington that existed 390 million years ago in the Devonian Period; for context: the bolide impact that played a role in wiping out the dinosaurs occurred approximately 65 million years ago. In the Early and Middle stages of the Devonian, the landscape was pretty bare; there were lots of open wetlands dominated by small spore-bearing herbs but no trees. Giant sea scorpions and armored fishes patrolled the world’s vast tropical oceans and the poles had little to no icecaps. It was a pretty alien sounding environment, which is also why I find it so interesting.
Jessica: What do you like most about volunteering at the Burke?
Jeff:I get access to all these crazy fossils that are so nicely organized and taken care of as well as a fantastic team of curators and paleobiologists. I want to encourage other students interested in paleobotanical or paleontological research in general to get involved at the Burke because they can give undergraduate research students incredible access to the collections. The faculty and collections managers at the Burke are welcoming to students with research project ideas that are mentored by Burke or university faculty, or to students that are interested in volunteering through helping organize and catalogue the fossil collections or help prep fossils.
Jessica: I heard you’ve won some awards and recognition recently – can you tell me about that?
Jeff: Dr. Strömberg and I are currently writing a paper on a potentially new species of clubmoss as well as a second paper on a global analysis comparing morphology in Leclercqia across six continents. Recently, I received the Isabel C. Cookson Paleobotanical Award for the best paper presented by a student in paleobotany and palynology at the Botanical Society of America conference this summer for presenting on these two projects. Usually this award is given to a graduate student, so I was surprised to receive it as an undergraduate. I feel fortunate as this award can possibly help generate additional recognition for the Burke Museum and its Paleobotany Collection as a great resource for researchers. I also recently received a National Geographic Young Explorer grant to study changes in clubmoss and fern leaf structure in response to climate change in Hawaii this September for a few weeks and will be joined by another regular at the Burke Museum, Adam Huttenlocker, a graduate student of vertebrate paleontology curator Dr. Christian Sidor for this work.
Thank you, Jeff, for the great work you do for the Burke and congratulations!
Last week, generous Burke Museum supporter and University of Washington professor Estella Leopold was awarded the prestigious International Cosmos Prize, which recognizes "Those who have, through their work, applied and realized the ideals which the Foundation strives to preserve how ... we as human beings can truly respect and live in harmony with nature" (Read a Seattle Times article about the award here).
Estella, 83, has been teaching and conducting research for more than 60 years, 35 of them at the UW. Among many other accomplishments, she pioneered the use of fossilized pollen and spores in North America to understand how plants and ecosystems respond over eons to such things as climate change. In 2005, she helped create an endowment at the UW in support of plant fossil research, the Estella B. Leopold professorship and curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum, currently held by Dr. Caroline Strömberg, who studies Cenozoic evolution of grasses.
Estella is also famous for pushing the federal government to form the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument to preserve part of a spectacular paleobotanical site in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. This area had been on private land and had been a commercial collecting site since homesteaders opened small quarries in the 1870s – visitors could collect a few meters from the train that brought them up there from Colorado Springs. For over 100 years, fossil leaves, flowers, fruits and a huge variety of insects were collected and sent to university museums, as well the Smithsonian, America Museum, and the Denver Museum of Natural History (The Burke actually holds Estella’s own fossil collection).
In 1968 a real-estate developer planned a subdivision of small holiday homes on top of the fossil beds. Estella, with Vim Wright and Beatrice Willard, formed the Defenders of Florissant and fought in court for legislation to protect these fossil beds. It was a tough fight, but in August 1969 a bill was passed to establish 6,000 acres as the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument. The first thing you see when you walk into the one-room visitors’ center at the National Monument is a picture of Estella.
Grass is something we all take for granted; it covers 1/3 of the Earth’s land surface, and provides many different sources of food for humans and other animals as well. But when did grasses first appear on the planet? How do they respond to varying climates? And, who/what ate them? These are just a few of the questions that Caroline Strömberg, Curator of Paleobotany at the Burke, seeks to answer when she travels to Patagonia, Argentina this month.
Why Patagonia? Paleontologists believe open grasslands first appeared in South America 30-million years ago, long before they emerged on other continents, based on evidence of large, herbivorous mammals called “meridiungulates” that appear in the fossil record at that time. These mammals had long legs and high-crowned teeth that seem specialized for grass-eating.
The research conducted by Caroline and her colleagues Matt Kohn (Boise State University), Rick Madden (Duke University), and Alfredo Carlini (Museo de La Plata, Argentina) can help answer other important questions that are currently affecting the world today. By analyzing the relationship between meridiungulates and vegetation, the gaps filled in the fossil record through the Patagonia research can help us better understand why, and how, both vegetation and animals respond to climate change.
So good luck, Caroline! We look forward to your return and learning more from your findings!
Estella, 83, has been teaching and conducting research for more than 60 years, 35 of them at the UW. Among many other accomplishments, she pioneered the use of fossilized pollen and spores in North America to understand how plants and ecosystems respond over eons to such things as climate change. In 2005, she helped create an endowment at the UW in support of plant fossil research, the Estella B. Leopold professorship and curator of paleobotany at the Burke Museum, currently held by Dr. Caroline Strömberg, who studies Cenozoic evolution of grasses.
Why Patagonia? Paleontologists believe open grasslands first appeared in South America 30-million years ago, long before they emerged on other continents, based on evidence of large, herbivorous mammals called “meridiungulates” that appear in the fossil record at that time. These mammals had long legs and high-crowned teeth that seem specialized for grass-eating.