Back from day 2 at GSA (thats the annual Geological Society of America meeting for those of you who are not up on the acronym). One of the highlights of the day was finally getting to meet Drs. Robert Bakker and Kathleen Zoehfeld, with whom I collaborated to create the HMNS Paleo Hall murals. We had a very engaging chat about their amazing discoveries of the tangle of Dimetrodon/xenacanthid shark reciprocal predation at the Craddock Ranch Permian bone bed. The day was also filled with another set of exciting talks, spanning the gamut from estimation of the tempo of the Cambrian evolutionary explosion to the use of Raman spectroscopy to detect melanin pigments preserved on fossilized soft tissues in a wide variety of vertebrate taxa, to the actual extraction of a (still intact!) pink pigment from fossilized Mesozoic invertebrates followed by the determination of its chemical structure by microcryoprobe NMR, which led to the discovery of a brand new class of pigments, the boron-containing borolithochromes.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 06:02:43 +0000
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