A paleontologist from Dinosaur National Monument and faculty from the New York Institute of Technology discussed evolutionary biology through the lens of paleontology to celebrate Darwin Day.

Andrew Sweet, committee chair of Darwin Day, said one of the goals of the event is to make evolutionary biology more accessible. 

“Evolution is not so much a subfield of biology as it is a lens through which we view biology,” Sweet said. “Darwin Day is therefore not necessarily a celebration of Darwin himself but an opportunity and a nice alliteration for the day to highlight how evolution plays an integral role and understanding how life works, both now and in the past.”

Sweet said Darwin didn’t invent evolutionary biology or even come up with the idea of evolution or natural selection first, but his book “The Origin of Species” was a turning point in how people think about evolution in science.

“One area that’s especially relevant to evolutionary biology is paleontology. Darwin himself was really interested in fossils and actually one of his main roles on the famous voyage of the Beagle was as a geologist to collect fossils from all over the world,” Sweet said.

The event featured guest speaker ReBecca Hunt-Foster, a monumental paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monuments. In 2003 Hunt-Foster did a study on the only dinosaur fossil found in Arkansas, informally named Arkansarus Fridayi and found it to be an unknown species of dinosaur. 

“There’s a lot of really cool fossils around the state of Arkansas and a lot of them are marine fossils that are older than dinosaurs, so that’s cool that we have all these abundant marine fossils but that we also have some cool dinosaurs that have never really been studied and that are kind of new to the science,” Hunt-Foster said. 

Hunt-Foster said she wanted to speak at A-State because she grew up in Arkansas, so she wanted to share information about fossils found around the state. 

The roundtable Feb. 14 featured four paleontologists who teach at NYIT to share their expertise.

Karen Poole, Ph.D., said she wanted to be a paleontologist from a young age and her enthusiasm for the field grew when she went on a dig in Utah at 14 years old and found a Datasaurus femur taller than her. 

Poole now studies Iguanodontians, a group of herbivorous dinosaurs that lived in the middle Jurassic to late Cretaceous periods, using CT scanning to reconstruct the bone structure of fossil features.

Adam Cossette, Ph.D., studies both modern and fossil relatives of the modern American alligator. 

“I’m very concerned with looking at biotic change over long timescales into both short timescales and I’m also interested in looking at how biology changes as a result of environmental disruptions, especially climate change,” Cossette said. 

Cossette said he found a new species of alligator in the Tupelo tongue in Mississippi he named Deinosuchus Schwimmer after David Schwimmer, a paleontologist at Columbus State University. vv

Todd Green, Ph.D., said he studies living animals to better understand extinct animals and particularly enjoys big flightless birds. 

“Some of us go in on gigs trying to find fossils, trying to understand piecing together the animals that were once alive. I’m actually working backward. We’re trying to understand some of these living animals to better understand the extinct animals,” Green said. 

Jason Bourke, Ph.D., is a vertebrate paleontologist specializing in functional morphology. Bourke said a lot of his work is in soft tissue reconstruction and paleophysiology.  

Bourke said a question he gets at the beginning of every school year is ‘Why are paleontologists teaching at a med school?’

“It helps to have people who study anatomy and know it well teach anatomy to that next generation,” Bourke said. “Whether it’s a crocodile, cassowary or human being, a vertebrate’s a vertebrate and we all share basically the same structures.”

Isabella Davis, a junior biology student from Beebe, Ark., said she learned more about different rock formations, fossils and paleontology as a field. 

“It’s a great way to learn more about science and get involved,” Davis said. “The roundtable was a great way to learn about the different research opportunities out there in the field of paleontology.” 

Categories: News