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Stigall Lab at University of Tennessee, Knoxville

My students, postdoc, and I are having such a fun time with science, courses, and adventuring here at UTK that I’ve clearly given up trying to keep a lab blog about the great things happening here. My apologies for that, but we are having a great time and lots of success working the Late Ordovician of Tennessee (Nashville region) and comparing impacts of the Richmondian Invasion in this area vs. Cincinnati, exploring the Devonian of the Parana Basin in Brazil, checking out Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event trajectories globally, and even spending some time with Devonian trilobites.

Our lab personnel and publications pages are fully updated. So you can keep track of a little of what’s happening in those spaces.

During the 2024-25 academic year, the first two MS students graduated from the UTK Stigall Lab, Mariana Vilela-Andrade and Noel Hernandez Gomez. Mariana’s thesis was published as two papers. Noel’s is soon to be submitted for publication. Mariana and Shymah Beegum are working on their PhDs now, with Shymah just passing her qualifying exams (yay!). Kat Jordan is a post-doc working on many things, including proteid trilobite evolution. And we have a group of wonderful undergrads that have cycled through the lab over the past three years.

Early summer = field reconnaissance

Early summer = field reconnaissance
Springtime flowers atop the 550 outcrop

The best part of Spring semester ending is the flexibility of schedule to head into the field!  Relatedly, Nilmani and I have spent several days scouting field sites for her MS thesis examining paleoecology of the Ames Limestone.  The Ames is an extremely well-known marker bed throughout the Appalachian Basin and has been the subject of many petrological, faunal, and ecological analyses over the years.  Nilmani’s project will add to this body of knowledge by examining how community structure varies at multiple spatial scales.

Armed with a productive year of preliminary analyses and background study, Nilmani is ready to tackle her main research this summer.  Step 1 is identifying outcrops.  We’ve visited over a dozed previously described locations throughout Athens, Hocking, Morgan, Noble, Muskingum Counties.  Some sites are extremely promising for her thesis work.  Others, not so much.

Overall, we’ve had a lot of fun exploring the rocks, fossils, wildflowers, wildlife, and general region of SE Ohio.  And as always, perhaps my favorite parts of “spring training” is having solo time in the car and field to really get to know my students.

What’s that fossil?

The Ohio University Communications and Marketing Office released a news story highlighting the Stigall Lab’s work on the Digital Atlas of Ancient Life app.  I am really very proud of the hard work that so many graduate and undergraduate students have put into making the Ordovician Atlas project come to life.isorophus

 

Read the full story here: 
https://www.ohio.edu/research/communications/news-story.cfm?newsItem=355824A4-5056-A874-1D3C7E5EF18BBE6A