Ceara presented her MS thesis research at this virtual Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America this year. It was nice to come together to share our science, even if virtually.
Ceara Purcell and Alycia L. Stigall. How does niche evolution contribute to diversification? A test using ecological niche modelling to examine Laurentian brachiopods during the Ordovician
Both Ceara and Alycia presented the results of their current research into Ordovician biodiversity dynamics, and Alycia co-organized the meeting.
I was recently a guest on the Common Descent podcast. Will and David were really wonderful to talk with and had really great and insightful questions. Our discussion was broad ranging and included brachiopods (of course), the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, running a paleontology lab, why my students are family to me, and running an international conference.
Spotlight – Alycia Stigall (3/5)
Welcome to our Spotlight Series! We’re talking paleo-science with some paleo-people! In this 5-part series, we’ve interviewed 5 different invertebrate paleontologists about their research and other work. In Episode 3, our guest is Dr. Alycia Stigall, shar…
Be sure to also check out the Common Descent interviews with lab alumni Adriane Lam and Ranjeev Epa! Links here.
The main meeting for me this summer was the International Paleontological Conference in Paris, from July 8-12th. Dan and I typically attend the IPC meetings (prior conferences included IPC3 in London in 2010 and IPC4 in Mendoza, Argentina in 2014). These are really broad international conferences with the potential to meet with international colleagues that we don’t see at the Annual GSA meetings.
Due to the timing of this year’s meeting, we decided to take our kids for their first European adventure. So spent a week in Paris to attend the conference and explore then a week in the Swiss Alps. It was a really fantastic plan! A very nice mix of European capitals and amazing nature. The kids can’t wait to go back!
Here is a write up I did for Ohio University:
OHIO Paleontologists Stigall, Hembree Present in Paris – Ohio University | College of Arts & Sciences
Ohio University paleontologists Drs. Alycia Stigall and Daniel Hembree, both professors of Geological Sciences, presented at the 5th International Paleontological Congress in Paris (IPC5), France in July. The IPC5 is the largest gathering of professional paleontologists globally, and this meeting included more than 1,000 participants from around the world. All …
And some of my favorite photos:
Here is my longer, formal report about all the exciting things that happened as part of the IGCP 653 meeting.
Annual meeting synopsis and photos | IGCP 653
The main Annual Meeting of the IGCP 653, titled “Trekking Across the GOBE (Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event): From the Cambrian through the Katian”, was a great success. The main meeting on the Ohio University campus, brought together a group of 60 scientists from eight nations. Read the Ohio University writeup here.
In my role as co-leader of the IGCP 653 project, I have a variety of jobs. One is the social media/website/communications/membership director for the project. Another is to convene occasional symposia at meetings, like this one that I co-led with Rebecca Freeman at 2017 Annual GSA meeting in Denver. The most significant role so far, however, has been to organize the IGCP 653 Annual Meeting at my home institution, Ohio University.
Planning an international conference is a complex endeavor, and I spent substantial amount of the 2017-2108 academic year planning everything from the meeting website, meeting rooms, banquets, housing, arranging catering, acquiring grant support, printing name tags, producing the abstract volume, developing shuttle schedules to move participants from the Columbus airport to Athens, identifying volunteers to run field excursions, and then helping them with logistics, plus managing the finances of the entire system. Needless to say, it was a tremendous effort, and the support of my co-organizers (especially Dan Hembree!) and the students workers during the meeting week was critical to success.
Overall, the meeting went very well. We welcomed over 60 scientists from 8 countries to Athens. The pre-conference excursion to the late Cambrian through Middle Ordovician strata of Great Basin of Utah and Nevada was spectacular, and the mid- and post-conference excursions to Kentucky were outstanding. Everyone went home with plenty of brachiopods–and some other fossils, perhaps–and a greatly improved understanding of the stratigraphy, geochemistry, paleontology, and other facets of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event.
It was extremely rewarding to welcome my colleagues to campus after months of planning. I learned a great deal in the process and was able to get to know some amazing people much better than I otherwise would have if it wasn’t my meeting. However, I will also be very pleased to be an attendee and not an organizer for the foreseeable future.
Geological Sciences Hosts International Conference on Campus – Ohio University | College of Arts & Sciences
Ohio University hosted the Third Annual Meeting of the International Geoscience Programme (IGCP) 653 in June. This conference, titled “Trekking Across the GOBE (Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event): From the Cambrian through the Katian” brought together a group of 60 scientists from eight nations. Participants engaged in three days of scientific …
Hot off the presses!
The Stigall Lab has two new articles published in the Lethaia special issue “Contextualizing the Great Ordovician Biodiversificaiton Event”. This special issue derives from the IGCP 653 opening meeting in Durham in October 2016, and includes papers on many aspects of the GOBE and related topics. You can access the entire issue online here.
Our lab has two contributions:
Stigall, A.L. 2018. How is biodiversity produced? Examining speciation processes during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Lethaia, 51 (2), 165-172. https://doi.org/10.1111/let.12232.
–In this paper, I make the case that it is critical to consider biological aspects of speciation, not only aggregate diversity counts, when seeking the causes of diversification events, such as the GOBE.
Trubovitz, S., & Stigall, A.L. 2018. Ecological revolution of Oklahoma’s rhynchonelliform brachiopod fauna during the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Lethaia, 51(2), 277-285. https://doi.org/10.1111/let.12233.
–This is the second half of Sarah Trubovitz MS thesis, which examines community structure and body size in brachiopod communities across the GOBE in the Simpson Group of Oklahoma.
I was very fortunate to attend the IGCP Project 653 outstanding workshop and field excursion in Marrakech and Zagora region of Morocco from February 12-16, 2018.
This was a fantastic trip! Morocco is a fantastic country with amazing geology and really wonderful people. The Fezouata outcrops were really tremendous, and I was able to collect some specimens for my teaching collection as well.
Click here to read my write up and visit photo galleries that I posted as the media czar for the IGCP project. A few bonus photos are below.
It’s occurred to me that I have been writing quite a bit about broadening participation in science lately and have not actually talked much about what science I have been up to. So here is a brief update about recent developments on that front.
At the IGCP 653 meeting in Yichang, China, I presented new research on some very interesting and rare fossils from the lower part of the Cincinnatian Series. Over the past few years, I have been very fortunate to receive a series of rare fossils collected by some of the fantastic amateur paleontologists of the Dry Dredgers in Cincinnati, Ohio. In particular, Ron Fine, has collected some intriguing brachiopods from the lower Cincinnatian Kope Formation (Edenian Regional Stage) that look like they belong to lineages otherwise only known as invasive taxa from the upper Cincinnatian (Richmondian Regional Stage). These pre-Richmondian “invaders” comprise an interesting set of species that shed light on invasion dynamics in the fossil record.
At Yichang, I argued that interbasinal species invasions (or immigrations) could be considered in a hierarchical context, with ranks including ephemeral invasion, incursion epibole, and biotic immigration events. I am currently expanding this invasion hierarchy into a full article for Annual Reviews in Ecology and Evolutionary Systematics. (AREES), so I won’t elaborate here, but I think this is a really exciting and potentially transformative concept about the assembly of diversity through time.
At the GSA meeting in Seattle, I am presenting research related speciation mechanisms and how we can move from a basic correlation of diversity with Earth systems events to a causal mechanism for increasing diversity based on the process of speciation. Much of the arguments for this talk are in press already within my Lethaia paper (here).
So…for the near term, these are the scientific questions that I am investigating and the questions that keep me up at night: how do we really resolve speciation processes in the fossil record, how can we use that information to understand diversification during the Ordovician Radiation/Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, and how do invasions (of varying intensities) contribute to diversity patterns of life through time?*
*obviously these questions are best addressed with data about articulated brachiopods from the Ordovician Period
I’m currently on a 12 hour flight from Shanghai to Chicago as part of my 3 flight (and 29 hour) itinerary home from the 2nd Annual IGCP 653 meeting in Yichang, China. I can say, unreservedly, that this was a fantastic meeting!
Attendees included more than 60 delegates from 10 nations. The fact that most attendees were Chinese—and I am not—provided a wonderful opportunity for me to meet many new and upcoming scientists—both students and early career professionals that I have not previously had the opportunity to interact with. I was so impressed by the quality of their science and their ability to communicate at a high level on an international stage. What a talented group of young scientists! I am incredibly encouraged and inspired by them.
Of course, I was also able to reunite with (and meet new) colleagues from Europe, Africa, and North America as well. Truly this meeting met the spirit of UNESCO, our funding agency for the IGCP project, in terms of bridging international divides and fostering common interests and collaborations.
At this conference, provocative scientific ideas were espoused—generating substantial discussion, important geologic sections were visited (including the GSSPs for both the Hirnantian and Dapingian stages!), and cultural differences were both explored and celebrated. It’s exciting both how much we have learned about the Great Ordovician Biodiverisfication Event in terms of ocean chemistry, oxygenation patterns, diversity patterns of metazoans and also how much we have to learn—such as when did this event start and end, whether such things can be clearly defined, and what does that mean for the Earth system?
Speaking for myself, my favorite parts were probably the fact that we had an international assemblage of brachiopod workers to talk with (it’s great-and rare to be among people that love my favorite fossils as much as I do!) and that there were so many dynamic young female researchers in the group.
As anyone who is relatively close to me knows, I am very concerned with increasing participation in science on both a national and international level. I was so encouraged to see so many young and dynamic female scientists! Female students earned awards for both poster and oral presentations. This is pretty groundbreaking.
To place this in context, I had a conversation with a colleague, who I generally admire very much as a scientist, in which he said to me one evening {I’m paraphrasing} “You know, we always try to hire men instead of women for permanent jobs. You can’t say that in open meetings, but in secret meetings, we always say this.” I asked why this was the case and was told that it could be problematic for women to both be in charge of or be the majority of a field team to remote regions. I pushed back on this concept (I certainly was told the similar things as a grad student), and my friend said “Well, most women are not like you. They are not assertive and independent.” On one level, I was glad that my colleague appreciated that some women could be leaders, but it also made clear to me that there are many countries where women still need to fight hard to be considered scientific equals. I am not special. Female scientists need the chance to grow and shine and deserve the same support as our male colleagues.
The male student at our table noted that the female students work much harder and achieve higher levels of excellence than the male students. He sees the value in this contemporaries, and I am heartened that over time this view will win out…but I’d much rather we achieve equity in the near term and not wait 20 years and lose out on the great science these young women could have done by excluding them.
I hope that my work in the international community can help to foster a sense of empowerment for female (and other underrepresented) scientists in both the USA and other nations. At this meeting, I was assertive. I capitalized on my leadership as a co-chair of IGCP 653 role to be present, to chair sessions, to judge and present awards, to invite everyone to Athens, Ohio in 2018, and I hope that seeing one woman do that in a sea dominated by male leadership can help to inspire the fantastic and talented women that I met at this meeting to be assertive and empowered in their own scientific lives.
