Sunday, June 12, 2016

More specie-fically....


So Opie reminded me that while I talked a little bit about my project, I could have talked more about phylogenies and how we actually come up with these crazy trees.

Not trees like the ones across the street in central park. These are family trees, much like those you can make that describe your relationship to your parents and siblings. However, these describe similarities between species. More recently, this is done with genetics. However, the bones and genetics don't always line up perfectly. With birds, we haven't been able to figure out specific patterns with anything other than the genetics, but as they should be there, we keep looking.

It's good practice. We don't frequently have genetic data with fossils, and by finding the patterns in modern animals that we have entire skeletons for, we can look for the same patterns in the partial skeletons of fossilized ones.

We can put numbers to those similarities and differences, and then a computer can calculate their "closeness."

Pretty soon our little tree sprouts branches and offers information. This allows us to make guess about behavior, find patterns in function of different structures, and hypothesize about the parts of animals that don't fossilize. In modern animals, we use it to design experiments, depending on whether we need very similar or very different animals. Its one more method towards being able to tell a more complete story.

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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.