Tag: Paleontology

Gabriela Mángano receives the Billings Award at the Canadian Paleontology Conference!

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The 2023 Canadian Paleontology Conference was recently held at the University of Toronto Mississauga in Mississauga, Ontario, held by the Geological Association of Canada’s Paleontology Division (GAC PD). Our own Gabriela Mángano was honoured at the conference as the 2023 recipient of the Billings Award! This is an award given to those who have made an outstanding long-term contribution to any aspect of Canadian paleontology or by a Canadian to paleontology.

Gabriela is the first woman paleontologist to win this distinction! You can read more about the Billings Award on the GAC PD website here.

Photo provided by Luis Buatois

Huge congratulations to Gabriela from all of us at Ichnoplanet! You’ve certainly left traces of your wisdom in the substrate of paleontology!

Written by Jack Milligan

Gabriela Mángano receives the Distinguished Career Award at GSA!

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At the annual meeting of the Geologic Society of America in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, our own Dr. Gabriela Mángano is the 2023 recipient of the Distinguished Career Award from the Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division! We’re super thrilled to have Gabriela receive this awesome award and couldn’t agree more as to her deserving of this recognition.

From the Geologic Society of America Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division website: “Gabriela has approached geobiology from the perspective of animal-substrate interactions in deep time. She likes to move along the geologic time scale to detect evolutionary breakthroughs and track the deep history of bioturbation. Her research attempts to reconstruct the emergence of modern marine benthic ecology discern environmental from evolutionary controls, and temporally calibrate ichnofacies and ichnofabrics.”

Congratulations Gabriela from all of us at Ichnoplanet!

Photos courtesy of the Geologic Society of America Geobiology and Geomicrobiology Division and Luis Buatois

Written by Jack Milligan

Trilobite fossil recovered from southwestern Saskatchewan subsurface Earlie Formation core sample

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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!

Written by Jack Milligan

Modern animal life could have arisen in a storm-dominated deltaic environment

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Our understanding of how and where the ancestors of modern life evolved has been the question of many paleontologists for a long time. Recently, an international team of sedimentologists and paleontologists, including Dr. Luis Buatois, Dr. Gabriela Mángano, and Dr. Maximiliano Paz, demonstrated that a world-famous Cambrian soft-bodied fossil assemblage in Yunnan province, China, lived and died in a delta front environment affected by storms. The Chengjiang Biota records the exquisite preservation of soft-bodied marine invertebrates, including worms, early arthropods, and early vertebrates. This assemblage is around 518 million years old, around the time of the famous Cambrian explosion, where modern communities of animals first started to truly diversify. The Chenjiang biota has a similar faunal makeup to the Burgess Shale biota from British Columbia, Canada. The team analyzed a core taken from Cambrian outcrops in Yunnan, China, and discovered that the sequence of strata was formed in a shallow marine, deltaic environment. High rates of sedimentation and indications of high salinity point to this deltaic environment being dominated by storms and river floods. These kinds of sediments help us to understand the exceptional taphonomy of fossils from these Cambrian assemblages.

Figure. Block diagram showing the storm-flood-dominated delta and associated cores showing depositional sequences. (From F. Saleh et al., 2022)

The full article can be accessed in Nature Communications.

Written by Jack Milligan