The Upchurch Paleobotany Lab at Texas State University-San Marcos

3 generations of paleobotanists :)

Mini lab reunion!

One of those abstracts was from Jon Richey, master's student in the lab.

Blood Falls: Antarctica's Stunning Secret Could microbial life at Antarctica's Blood Falls be the key to finding life on other planets?

Jon Richey, master's student in the lab, will be presenting a poster at the GSA annual meeting in Denver Colorado and has also received an On to The Future (OTF) Diversity Travel Grant to help with the cost of attendance.

Jon Richey, a master's student in the Upchurch lab, recently did an interview about his research with the Texas State University Radio Station. Check it out.

Newscast: Global Climate Change Scientists have predicted that rising global temperatures caused by the trapping of sunlight by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, will have a detrimental effect on human s...

Fossilised giant camel bone found in High Arctic Ancient beast stood almost three metres tall at the hump, about a third higher than its modern descendant

Ancient Fossilized Sea Creatures Yield Oldest Biomolecules Isolated Directly From A Fossil Though scientists have long believed that complex organic molecules couldn't survive fossilization, some 350-million-year-old remains of aquatic sea creatures uncovered in Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa have challenged that assumption.

Important information for the lab.

New timing data for the K-Pg boundary event.

Teams from the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, have come up with new evidence that the most famous of all the extinction events, because it wiped out the dinosaurs, the K-Pg extinction was caused by an asteroid impact; or at least the final stage of the extinction event was accompanied by an impact.

The research team had noticed that none of the existing dates seemed to match, and the method used wasn't as accurate as it could be, so before attempting to date the impact they re-calibrated and revamped the existing 40Ar/39Ar dating technique.

Using ash collected from the Hell Creek Formation in Montana and tektites from Haiti, the researchers have come up with the most precise date yet for the impact event, 66,038,000ma.

This date is, according to the team, accurate to within 11k years, and is the most precise date yet.

The team are quick to add that whilst there was an impact event accompanying the final stage of the K-Pg event, there was a decline in flora and fauna for over a million years before the impact. Climate variation, possibly from erupting flood basalt's (the Deccan traps) had caused dramatic changes in environmental conditions, leading to biological decline.

The team are also keen to date the Deccan Traps, and it is expected that the new dates will be gathered in the near future.

-LL

Links;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130207141444.htm

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6120/684


Image; Artists impression of an asteroid impacting the Earth. revers_jr / Fotolia

R.I.P Dr. Leo Hickey

NOAA research finds new way to identify which El Niño events will have biggest impact on U.S. winter El Niño, warmer than average waters in the Eastern equatorial Pacific (shown in orange on the map), affects weather around the world. A new study, just published in the February 2013 issue of the Journal of Climate, describes an atmospheric El Niño signal that is very strongly associated with U.S. w...