Month: April 2017

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Other Sponsored Lectures

Science on Tap debuts at Rising Silo featuring Dr. Bill Hopkins

The first SCIENCE ON TAP event in Blacksburg, VA took place on April 24, 2017 and featured Dr. Bill Hopkins, director of the Global Change Center and professor of fish and wildlife conservation. Bill showed the crowd a real live hellbender, described his research on this threatened salamander species, and encouraged audience members to pose for hellbender photos.

The event was organized by Dr. Katie Burke, digital editor at American Scientist and an advisory board member for the Virginia Tech Center for Communicating Science.

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Accolades Interfaces of Global Change IGEP

Tony Timpano receives the 2017 Karen P. DePauw Outstanding Presentation Award

As an Interfaces of Global Change (IGC) Fellow, and a doctoral student in the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Tony Timpano studies how increased salinization in freshwater streams can impact macroinvertebrate communities.

Tony Timpano, FREC

Timpano, along with other IGC fellows, presented his research findings at a recent IGC Graduate Research Symposium in Fralin Hall. This annual event highlights the latest research from the program’s graduate student fellows, who come from various disciplines, including biological sciences, entomology, fish and wildlife, biological systems engineering, horticulture, plant pathology, and forest resources and environmental conservation.

Judges observing the student talks throughout the day awarded Tony 1st Place for best presentation. Tony received the 2017 Karen P. DePauw Outstanding Presentation Award at the conclusion of the symposium.

Congratulations, Tony!

More photos from the 2017 IGC Symposium on FLICKER

 

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Categories
Opinion

Why some protests are effective and others aren’t

From The Atlantic

On April 22, scientists and science enthusiasts will gather in Washington, D.C. and 480 other cities to march for science. Their numbers will likely be large and their signs will undoubtedly be nerdy. Much has been written about the march—whether it’s a good idea or a terrible one, whether it will rally people or distance them, whether it’s goals are acceptably varied or too diffuse, whether it cares too little or too much about matters of diversity, and whether it will be a cathartic flash-in-the-pan or the seed for something more.

But these are all empirical questions, and there are indeed scientists who study political movements. Hahrie Han at the University of California, Santa Barbara is one of them. She studies the ways in which civic organizations get people involved in activism and build power for political change—and she’s written three books on the subject. I talked to her about the March for Science and what might happen afterwards.

Ed Yong: How do you see the march?

Hahrie Han: In thinking about the science of activism or social movements, there are two categories of questions that interest me. One is what does science tell us about what strategies are most effective with engaging people in different forms of activism? The second is this: Even if the organizers are able to get the people out in large numbers, how do you translate that into political power? If we can get a million scientists out to D. C., how does that actually turn into a kind of political voice?

Yong: It seems like the march is successfully attracting large numbers, so I want to focus on that second question about what happens afterwards. What do we know about that?

Han: It’s hard to provide generalized lessons because a lot of the answers are so context-dependent. It’s not like in every case where a march turns into political influence, the same things are happening. But a couple of things come to mind.

First, the research says that it’s not just about what you have but how you use what you have. A lot of times, people look at protests and movements and catalogue how much money they raised, or how many people they turned out into the street. The numbers are a proxy for political influence. But we can think of examples throughout history where you have movements with few people and that generate lots of influence, or ones with a lot of people and little influence.

This is a little controversial, but take the Arab Spring. They turned out hundreds of thousands of people into Tahrir Square and brought down Mubarak, but they couldn’t keep the military out of power in the long-term. The Occupy movement was able to get a lot of people to occupy public spaces for a long period of time, and while they did really important work in changing the conversation about inequality, we didn’t see tangible policy gains that ameliorated the inequalities that triggered those movements. And in the current moment, the Women’s March got 3.5 million people out—an amazing number. But will it translate into improvements? It might, but it’s a valid question. Having the numbers on your side doesn’t mean you’ll have political influence if there’s no clear pathway from what you have to what you want.

Yong: Is there a better proxy, besides numbers?

Han: It really depends on the ways in which organizations, and whoever is leading this coalition, can strategically translate the resources they have into relationships and political influence with people who are decision-makers. With the March for Science, given the initial resistance of the people in the movement to politicize it, and the newness of these groups in thinking about their work in political terms, it’ll be a challenge to develop those strategic capacities. It’s like a muscle. You need to practice it over time. The fact that they’re new to it could be a disadvantage in that they don’t have experience. The upside is that they are new, so they might have creativity and new ideas that can jostle up the system.

Yong: You mentioned leaders, and I’m curious about whether that’s important. It seems like several movements like the Tea Party and the new Indivisible group formed from the ground-up, and are successful despite being pretty decentralized. Does the leadership matter?

Han: When we think about leadership, that’s different to whether authority is centralized. The work that the Indivisible movement is doing is very distributed, in that you have a lot of local activists taking control of resistance activities in their own communities. But what made Indivisible take off was a very centralized strategy. The founders put together that guide book and they wrote an op-ed in The New York Times to say: Here’s what you need to do lefties. And all these people who were hungry said: Hey, that makes sense. So there is leadership.

Read the full article at The Atlantic.

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Photo credit: By NYyankees51 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Categories
Blog Postcards Student Spotlight

A Day in the Field: Notes from Panamá

By Lisa Belden, with IGC Fellows Daniel Medina and Angie Estrada

Sunday, 7:46am

I am chugging café con leche and downing a whole plate of fresh papaya and pineapple while I wait for Dani to pick me up at the hotel.  It was a late night, with a delayed flight from Atlanta to Panama City, but I am anxious to get out to the field with Dani and Angie today.  Dani arrives and we weave our way through crazy traffic heading east out of the city.  Every bus stop has a fruit stand and I implore Dani to stop for guanabana, my favorite tropical fruit, but he says it is too dangerous to pull over at the bus stops, and after watching a few buses pull in and out, I have to admit he is probably right.*  We eventually leave the highway at a small town and stop to buy a few giant avocados en route to the field station.  A few river and stream crossings later, and we arrive in a tropical paradise.

Sunday, 11:15am

Dani and I are waiting in the open air “comedor” for Angie to return from scouting out a field site.  When she gets there, she immediately starts cooking.  We have a great lunch of tortillas and chorizo, with some of our recently acquired avocado.  After lunch, Dani and Angie start packing for the hike to the field site.  They are doing an important conservation project here—seeing if endangered toads that have been raised in captivity can survive at a site where they used to live. The hardest part of the project, hauling all the enclosures to the site (one per toad) and putting in the toads, was done a few days ago. Today we are going to go check on the toads and swab them, so we can monitor potential infection by chytrid fungus, the skin pathogen that likely drove this species to the brink of extinction in the first place. That swab will also allow us to assess the other microbes on their skin, so we can see how their symbiotic skin microbes change following re-introduction.  We think these microbes might play a role in disease resistance, and so we want to track how they might change over time in the field in these toads that are so susceptible to chytrid fungus.

 

Sunday, 2:23pm

We are hiking up a very steep trail, just outside of the station.  I stop to look at a frog (or maybe just to catch my breath). There is so much life in the lowland tropics– so many things to see. Hiking in a tropical forest, as a lover of biodiversity, is like no other experience. Every step brings something new to see… a frog leaping from underfoot, a giant caterpillar, a gorgeous orchid on a branch overhead, an amazing mushroom growing out of a stump, a flock of birds that make a ridiculous amount of noise but can’t be seen, the slightly eery sound of howler monkeys in the distance. We stop to watch two pied puff birds that look like small black and white kingfishers. They are sitting on a branch right next to the trail, near a termite mound and they seem as curious about us as we are about them. We keep moving and are headed downhill now, to a stream.  We walk down this stream, on slippery boulders and large cobbles. Dani points out a small frog carrying tadpoles on her back, looking for a place to put them in the stream.  It seems a precarious venture for such a small creature in a big stream, and I wish her well. We climb down the edge of a small waterfall that looks like it should be on a postcard, and soon we arrive at a larger stream, where the enclosures are, and the toads. It took an hour to get here and we have a lot to do, so we find the first enclosure downstream and get to work.  Dani and Angie carefully check and swab each toad.  Most are hiding in the leaf litter inside the enclosures, which is damp to the touch. I watch my students, trying to help a little where I can, and listen to the sounds of the forest—I am reminded of how much I love being in the field, and how that used to be a much bigger part of my job.

Sunday, 5:37pm

“Does everyone have extra batteries for their headlamps?” Angie asks. Dusk is rapidly approaching and we still have about 10 frogs left to swab.  We are walking upstream to the next set of enclosures, which are spaced out along the banks as the stream topography allows. I pause momentarily, and Angie says, “Keep walking, please”, with a bit of urgency. I move forward as my brain ticks off the things that might have produced that tone in her voice. Fer-de-lance, bullet ants, jaguar…That is as far as I get on my list before Angie points out the coral snake climbing through some short palms to our right at about shoulder height.  It is beautiful with its bands of red, yellow and black, and they aren’t aggressive snakes, so I stop to enjoy it for a moment.** When we arrive at the next enclosure it is nearly dark, and the loud squawking of blue-headed parrots is filling the dusky jungle. Soon it is completely dark, and we are working by headlamp to the plinking calls of hopeful male glassfrogs. The toads are sleeping on top of the palm fronds in their enclosures now that it is dark, so they are easier to find as we finish up our work.

Sunday, 10:32pm

It took us 90 minutes to get back to the field station from the end of the enclosure transect. We walked very carefully, eyes staring for vipers in the leaf litter on the trail as if it was a magic eyes illusion that would spring to life at any instant. At one point, Angie stopped to point out a large tree with a sparse line of bullet ants climbing it, and a few seconds later we all skirted around a bullet ant crossing the trail.  We have nothing but respect for the insects given a “4+” for the pain of their sting on a 4-point scale. After shockingly cold showers, we had peanut butter, bananas and crackers for dinner, and maybe a little rum. I climb into my hammock for the night, feeling grateful that I have the opportunity to be here for a few days with these two amazing graduate students in this incredible forest.

 

*A few days later, Dani found me a guanabana at a city market, and I ate the whole thing, essentially all by myself.  It was so good.

 

**We saw the snake again on the way out, and Dani determined it was a false coral snake, actually a colubrid, but still beautiful.

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Categories
Opinion

March for Science is already successful

From The Guardian

Science teacher Jackie Scott will be in the streets this Saturday in Little Rock, Arkansas. “I march because my middle school students deserve to have a better world,” she wrote. “They deserve to see what real research looks like and sounds like when it is communicated.”

From Oklahoma to Greenland, scientists and their champions will gather on April 22 for the much anticipated March for Science. And in many ways, the event is already a success: because thousands of scientists are speaking up, millions of people are considering how science actually matters to our lives.

We talk about how the government collects critical data to set air pollution standards. We discuss how investments in science have prevented pandemics. We examine how a physician helped expose the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan, and how a failure to collect data and ask the right questions made it worse.

The March for Science has started conversations within many families about scientists as public servants, my own included. My father’s cousin Barbara will march with me and other family to honor her late husband (and occasional scientific collaborator) Marvin, a renowned computational chemist.

It also brings visibility to other underrepresented groups in science. “I march to show that even a small town gay boy from Montana can become one badass inked astrochemist,” wrote Montana native Jay Kroll.

Sadly, the march also laments the collective failure of our politics to use science to address the grand challenges of our time. Ford Foundation president Darren Walker recently spoke of the poverty of imagination:

“It’s a poverty of imagination that diminishes our discourse, curtails curiosity, and makes our interactions petty and small. A poverty of imagination that breeds distrust for institutions and, increasingly, for information. A poverty of imagination that breeds distrust of other people who do not look or think like us. A poverty of imagination that shrinks our sense of self and our sense of a lofty and inspiring common purpose, luring us to the extremes rather than leading us towards the extraordinary.”

Science provides us with one essential tool to escape this quagmire. And in labs, schools, and businesses around the world, researchers are redefining their rightful role in society. Organizing, and demonstrating when necessary, has entered the scientific mainstream.

No longer are we simply debating whether experts should engage in public life because of an unsupported fear that science will be further politicized. Instead, scientists are exploring how they can best push back on actions that undermine the collection of data and development of independent analysis and, in turn, weaken our collective ability to address tough challenges. “We are a driving force across the entire planet for health and safety and reducing costs and reducing risk,” said University of Washington ocean scientist Sarah Mhyre.

Read the full story at The Guardian.

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Categories
Opinion

What Will You Do After Marching for Science?

By R. Bruce Hull

I explained why I’m not marching for science even though I’m “all-in” and support science with my heart, mind, and labor. Marching won’t change minds. Worse, because of Identity Protective Reasoning, marching will strengthen our critics’ resolve and weaken science’s influence. Every time we mention science or truth or climate or genes or funding or facts all we end up doing is triggering the critic’s internal dialog that blames loss of jobs, opportunity, and identity on liberal, global, elites (i.e., on scientists).  That is, marching for science is worse than preaching to the choir.

Marching on Earth Day will further reinforce the perception that science is captured by an elitist environmentalist agenda that promotes capitalism crushing government regulation.  Just imagine how Fox News will portray a scientist marching with a sign: CLIMATE SCIENCE MATTERS or EPA NEEDS SOUND SCIENCE.  The commentators will surely point out that the scientists are promoting an anti-business agenda and marching in support of stifling regulations and wasteful spending on more (unnecessary) research.  Further, if we expose our weaknesses (and there are many critiques of science that the March targets, including lack of diversity among scientists, politics of funding, and heavily defended silos), we just give our critics ammunition for their concerns about science as an institution.

I’m even more concerned that the March has no end game, so scientists will go back to their labs, books, and classrooms thinking they’ve done all they can or need to do.  WRONG!  We need to organize and expand our political power.  Education and agitation are important first steps, but they are wasted unless we organize for actions that win elections. Science must nurture and support a much bigger coalition.  We need to advance a narrative that supports liberalism and enlightenment.  We need to argue that poverty reduction and rising global middle class flows from global trade, that wellbeing and productivity comes from medicine and access to health care, that security depends upon ample food and clean water, that hope and opportunity comes from technology-driven economic development, and that all these things are supported by sound science.

Supporting a political agenda means scientists need to separate their careers from their citizenship.  We need to occasionally but explicitly leave our day jobs behind and engage in politics.  We need to speak from the heart about the values that define us, the reasons that motivate us, and the future we want to create.  That means advocacy.  Own it.

Scientists are thought leaders.  Our jobs give us the luxury of being paid to sit back and think about the world.  Share those thoughts.  Organize them and others in the support of political coalitions that win votes and steer the world towards the promise of the enlightenment instead of Trump’s anti-fact, anti-expertise, anti-science dark-ages that risk causing widespread pain and suffering.

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Dr. Bruce Hull is a Senior Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), a professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment (CNRE), and an affiliate faculty member in the Global Change Center.

Categories
Climate Change Water

Top 10 most endangered rivers in the US

From National Geographic

Water is life, yet climate change and certain public policies may be endangering its future in America, a nonprofit group warns in a new report. The stakes are high, with the current presidential administration having proposed budget cuts that may eliminate some safeguards for clean drinking water and rivers nationwide.

That’s according to American Rivers, a Washington, D.C.-based conservation group, which released its annual list of America’s Most Endangered Rivers on Tuesday. The list outlines rivers that the group warns face an urgent threat or critical decision point in the coming year.

The Lower Colorado River, which provides drinking water for more than 30 million Americans—including those in major cities like L.A., Las Vegas, and Phoenix—tops the list as the most endangered river this year. Second most endangered is the Bear River in California.

Similar to 2016’s list of the most endangered rivers, water scarcity, rising demand, and climate change put the Lower Colorado and Bear River at risk, says Amy Souers Kober, national communications director for American Rivers.

“The takeaway is that we can’t dam our way out of these problems,” Kober says. “On all of these rivers, we need 21st century water management solutions. We need political support and funding for water conservation.”

The Lower Colorado is challenged with water demands that outstrip supply and effects from climate change, the report says. Trump’s proposed cuts to the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture put the river at risk, the group argues. The reduced funding, if it passes Congress, could eventually lead to cutbacks on water deliveries to Arizona, California, and Nevada in the years ahead.

Additionally, the Lower Colorado is of particular importance to Latino communities, one-third of which live in the Colorado River Basin.

“From serving as the backbone for the agricultural industry to providing a cultural focal point for faith communities, the Lower Colorado River is essential to the livelihood of the Southwest,” said Maite Arce, president and CEO of Hispanic Access Foundation, in a press statement.

Other rivers on the list include the South Fork Skykomish in Washington; the Mobile Bay River in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi; and the Rappahannock River in Virginia.

Read the full story and see the top 10 list.

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Photo credit: By Paul Hermans – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22298121

 

Categories
Climate Change Global Change News

Climate change is trouble for cutthroat trout in the Rockies

From NPR:

There’s an unplanned experiment going on in the northern Rocky Mountains. What’s happening is that spring is arriving earlier, and it’s generally warmer and drier than usual. And that’s messing with some of the fish that live there.

The fish is the iconic cutthroat trout. It’s a native North American fish that thrives in cold, small streams. Explorer Meriwether Lewis of Lewis and Clark Expedition fame was among the first European-Americans to catch this spangly, spotted fish. He used deer spleen as bait.

It’s relative rarity now makes it a favorite for catch-and-release anglers. But biologists have now found that it’s in danger. The much more common rainbow trout is invading cutthroat streams and mating with the native fish. Ecologist Clint Muhlfeld says that creates hybrids.

“It jumbles up the genes that are linked to the locally adapted traits that these fish have evolved with,” says Muhlfeld, who’s with the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station.

Those traits have allowed cutthroats to survive through millennia in cold northern streams. And cold streams were thought to protect them from rainbows, which prefer warmer water.

But climate change is warming many high-altitude streams, and they frequently have less water, another change that favors rainbows. So they’re moving in.

Muhlfeld says that when rainbows and cutthroats breed, the resulting hybrids are feeble — “less fit,” in biological terms. “They don’t survive as well as the native fish,” he says. And hybrids that do survive continue to make more hybrids; there’s no going back to making cutthroats again.

Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, Muhlfeld and a team of scientists from several research institutions studied fish in hundreds of locations in the northern Rockies.

Read the full story at NPR.

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Categories
Ideas Opinion

Why I Won’t March for Science

By Dr. Bruce Hull

I marched in DC at the Women’s March, but I’m not marching for science.  I don’t see the end game.  Yes, we need more science, more respect for science, and better science, but more so, we need to win the political battles, and that means fighting for hearts and minds.

Scientists using their science are ill equipped to win hearts and minds.  Sadly, as I argued previously, the tendency of scientists to rely on facts and rationality often work against the ends they desire.  Winning hearts and minds mostly comes down to telling a compelling story, which scientists resist, because it means exposing their values.  For all kinds of reasons, some outdated and some legit, scientists often feel they lack the social license to be honest about their values.

Things do need to change.  Scientists need to change.  If we don’t begin winning the battles for hears and minds, we’ll lose the political war against scientific openness and deep expertise. And if that happens, society seems at real risk of sliding back into a pre-enlightenment era that characterized the “dark” Ages, when gut feelings and faith trumped facts and logic.  Those were not hopeful times (life expectancy was 20 and children had little hope of a life different than their peasant farmers living in crowded, windowless, smoke-filled hovels shared by livestock). The enlightenment (and science and individual rights and humanism and capitalism and all that came with it) gave people the courage to admit its OK to say, “I don’t know,” and realize how dangerous it is to trust myths and legends and populist leaders who promise easy answers.  The challenges of today are bigger and more complicated and more interconnected and more accelerated than ever before, so we need more science, more inquisitiveness and more tolerance for enlightened experimentation, not less.  Unfortunately, Trump is fanning the flames of anti-intellectualism, anti-truth, anti-inquisitiveness, anti-critical thinking, and anti-science.  Those flames risk plunging us into the dark.

Scientists and other professionals need to educate, agitate, and organize for winning hearts and minds. I found the Women’s March inspirational but draining (for an introvert) and it didn’t produce any next steps.  Marching for science might do more harm than good if it makes scientist feel they have done enough and are excused to go back to their labs and books.

I’ve been working for the last few years at the Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability helping scientists (and sustainability professionals writ large) influence hearts and minds.  The tools to do so are straightforward, but not easy.  Leadership programs have been teaching this stuff for years.  There exist tons of techniques for coalition building, boundary spanning, collaboration, interest based negotiation, collective impact, and social innovation that can be taught and mastered by scientists. Sadly, implementing those tools is time consuming and doesn’t produce grants, papers, promotion, or tenure.

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Dr. Bruce Hull is a Senior Fellow at Virginia Tech’s Center for Leadership in Global Sustainability (CLiGS), a professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment (CNRE), and an affiliate faculty member in the Global Change Center.

 

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Logo: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53269705

 

Categories
New Publications Research

Sterling Nesbit finds early dinosaur cousin had a surprising croc-like look

From VT News

For decades, scientists have wondered what the earliest dinosaur relatives looked like. Most assumed that they would look like miniature dinosaurs, be about the size of a chicken, and walk on two legs.

A Virginia Tech paleobiologist’s latest discovery of Teleocrater rhadinus, however, has overturned popular predictions. This carnivorous creature, unearthed in southern Tanzania, was approximately seven to 10 feet long, with a long neck and tail, and instead of walking on two legs, it walked on four crocodylian-like legs.

The finding, published in the journal Nature today, fills a critical gap in the fossil record. Teleocrater, living more than 245 million years ago during the Triassic Period, pre-dated dinosaurs.

It shows up in the fossil record right after a large group of reptiles known as archosaurs split into a bird branch (leading to dinosaurs and eventually birds) and a crocodile branch (eventually leading to today’s alligators and crocodiles). Teleocrater and its kin are the earliest known members of the bird branch of the archosaurs.

“The discovery of such an important new species is a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science.

He and Michelle Stocker, a co-author and also an assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science, will give a free public talk at 7 p.m. Thursday in 4069 Derring Hall, folllowed by a fossil viewing session at the Virginia Tech Museum of Geosciences on the second floor of Derring Hall.

Teleocrater fossils were first discovered in Tanzania in 1933 by paleontologist F. Rex Parrington, and the specimens were first studied by Alan J. Charig, former Curator of Fossil Reptiles, Amphibians and Birds at the Natural History Museum of London, in the 1950s.

Largely because the first specimen lacked crucial bones, such as the ankle bones, Charig could not determine whether Teleocrater was more closely related to crocodylians or to dinosaurs. Unfortunately, he died before he was able to complete his studies.

The new specimens of Teleocrater, found in 2015, clear those questions up. The intact ankle bones and other parts of the skeleton helped scientists determine that the species is one of the oldest members of the archosaur tree and had a crocodylian look.

Nesbitt and co-authors chose to honor Charig’s original work by using the name he picked out for the animal, Teleocrater rhadinus, which means “slender complete basin” and refers to the animal’s lean build and closed hip socket.

“The discovery of Teleocrater fundamentally changes our ideas about the earliest history of dinosaur relatives,” said Nesbitt. “It also raises far more questions than it answers.”

Scientists at dig site
Ken Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History, Sterling Nesbitt, an assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science, and Michelle Stocker, an assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science, work at the the Teleocrater dig site in Tanzania moments before the discovery was made by Roger Smith. Photo by Christian Sidor.
“This research sheds light on the distribution and diversity of the ancestors of crocodiles, birds, and dinosaurs,” said Judy Skog, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, “and indicates that dinosaur origins should be re-examined now that we know more about the complex history and traits of these early ancestors.”

Teleocrater and other recently discovered dinosaur cousins show that these animals were widespread during the Triassic Period and lived in modern day Russia, India, and Brazil. Furthermore, these cousins existed and went extinct before dinosaurs even appeared in the fossil record.

The team’s next steps are to go back to southern Tanzania this May to find more remains and missing parts of the Teleocrater skeleton. They will also continue to clean the bones of Teleocrater and other animals from the dig site in the paleontology preparation lab in Derring Hall.

“It’s so exciting to solve puzzles like Teleocrater, where we can finally tease apart some of these tricky mixed assemblages of fossils and shed some light on broader anatomical and biogeographic trends in an iconic group of animals,” said Stocker.

Stocker and Nesbitt are both researchers with the Global Change Center at Virginia Tech. Other co-authors on the paper include: Richard J. Butler with the University of Birmingham; Martin D. Ezcurra with Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales; Paul M. Barrett with the Natural History Museum of London; Kenneth D. Angielczyk with the Field Museum of Natural History; Roger M. H. Smith with the University of the Witwatersrand and Iziko South African Museum; Christian A. Sidor with the University of Washington; Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki with Uppsala University; Andrey G. Sennikov with Borissiak Paleontological Institute and Kazan Federal Univeristy; and Charig.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, a National Geographic Society for Young Explorers grant, and the Russian Government Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University.

More information is available through the Paleobiology & Geobiology Research Group at Virginia Tech website.

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Story by Lindsay Key, Communications Director, Fralin Life Science Institute