Last week, our own Andrei Ichaso successfully defended his doctoral thesis! His thesis focused on the stratigraphy, sedimentology, and ichnology of the middle Cambrian to Early Ordovician Deadwood Formation in western Canada and the midwestern United States. Congratulations Dr. Ichaso!
Andrei’s doctoral thesis earned him the University of Saskatchewan Graduate Thesis Award in the Physical & Engineering Sciences category from the College of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies at USASK. Congratulations Andrei!
This past summer, Jack Milligan represented Ichnoplanet during fieldwork conducted by the Boreal Alberta Dinosaur Project (BADP) at the University of Alberta (UA), and the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum (PJCDM) under the leadership of UA professor Dr. Corwin Sullivan, and USASK adjunct professor and PJCDM curator Dr. Emily Bamforth. Objectives of this fieldwork include collecting fossils from the late Cretaceous Wapiti Formation near the city of Grande Prairie. The Wapiti Formation is rich in fossils, including freshwater invertebrates, small vertebrates, and especially non-avian dinosaurs. The most common dinosaurs in northern Alberta based on the number of occurrences are the hadrosaurs, commonly referred to as the “duck-billed” dinosaurs. These are large herbivorous dinosaurs that have been suggested to travel in large herds in search of new food sources and as a defense against predatory theropod dinosaurs.
During July and August, BADP collected several large, three-toed hadrosaur tracks from various sites across northwestern Alberta. These tracks are isolated natural casts of footprints that infilled the original track and weathered out of situ. Some of these tracks were carried out of the site by hand across rushing rivers much to the chagrin, all be it temporary, by the team. Studying these tracks will allow the BADP team to learn more about the kinds of environments these dinosaurs were walking through and the taphonomy and different preservation of the tracks.
Images provided by Jack Milligan and Emily Bamforth.
Ichnoplanet would love to congratulate Dr. Manuel Pérez-Pueyo on his successful Ph.D. thesis defense at the University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain. His thesis is titled; “Contributions of the Tremp Fm (upper Maastrichtian) in Ribagorza (Aragonese Pyrenees, Huesca) to the knowledge of finicretaceous vertebrate communities on the Ibero-Armorican island.” Our own Luis Buatois was an external supervisor of this research. You can read more about Dr. Manuel Pérez-Pueyo’s research here.
We’re excited to hear about this outstanding accomplishment, and can’t wait to see where Manuel goes next!
Last week, our own Romain Gougeon successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis! Romain has worked very hard to achieve this milestone, so big congratulations to him! His thesis focused on integrating sedimentologic and ichnologic datasets to learn more about the evolution of early metazoans from the latest Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian Chapel Island Formation of Newfoundland, Canada. During his research, he and his collaborators have published a series of papers on this topic, much of which you can find on his profile, and on our publication page here.
We look forward to hearing more about your future research, and congratulations once again to now Dr. Romain Gougeon!
During his studies on the subsurface geology and ichnology of the Basal Sandstone Unit and Earlie Formation in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Ph.D. student Andrei Ichaso conducted core analysis of the study area. One of the studied core samples records the tide-influenced marginal-marine shales of the middle Cambrian Earlie Formation (~500 Ma), and also happened to capture something else. The complete body fossil of a trilobite, a Paleozoic marine invertebrate, was caught and preserved within the drill core! The trilobite was identified by a National University of Cordoba Ph.D. student, and former M.Sc. student in the Department of Geological Sciences at USask, Neal Handkamer, as Ehmania weedi. The specimen is around 32 mm long and recovered from a drilling depth of 2.3 km (see figure below, Handkamer et al., 2023).
This discovery marks the first occurrence of a trilobite body fossil of Cambrian age from the province of Saskatchewan. Following this discovery, the trilobite was featured on the front cover of the 2023 Saskatchewan Geoscience Calendar from the Saskatchewan Geological Society! You can read more in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences here.
Congratulations to Andrei on this awesome and remarkable find!
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