Bones and noses

On Monday the 7th of October, the whole Museums of the South of Jutland came in a trip to visit our small Gram (mainly the Museum of Natural history and Palaeontology, the Gram Castle and the Conservation lab). It has been a long and tiring day where we had to manage 97 persons coming from all the South of Jutland. Different trials were prepared, implicating to cast the nose of your teammate - a beautiful decoration above your fireplace - or answering to a quiz about the Museum. The total of points obtained was counted by the mighty judges in order to find a pair of winners.

For my part, I was implicated in the Clay Pit with Martin. After a little presentation of the geological context, the participants had to find some fossils. Depending of the quality, the fossil type, we gave a different amount of points. Some would say we were unfair, I prefer to say strict. Or maybe a bit unfair.

 I was at first a bit stressed about the trials, but everything was fine, I managed to help some I hope, in the identification or to find some stuff when they were really in despair. Unfortunately, excavation is also about random: in 45 minutes some were luckier than others! Nothing fancy has been found, most of the time mussels or snails of different species. Still, some found some scaphopods, bryozoan colonies and foraminifera for the hawk-eyes. There is even one pair of participants that found a crab claw, which is a pretty good finding! No shark tooth or whale bone though. The Director of the Museums was very disappointed…

After the excavations, we all met at the restaurant nearby the Gram castle. We gave the golden nose - a beautiful one – to the winners and finished this day with a coffee and a piece of cake. It was tiring, but I think everyone enjoyed it. Hope that some will come back to visit us again!

Transmitting science

I wanted to make an article about a course I attended in Spain about Geometrics Morphometrics with Chris Klingenberg. The course was situated in Els Hostalets de Pierola, a town nearby Barcelona. 

The substance of the course was really interesting: it was about the use of the different methods in the domain with concrete examples and whose who had datas could work on it with the opinion of world recognised scientist in the field. We learned to use MorphoJ, an intuitive software to perform Geometrics Morphometrics analysis. A great thing about the course was that Chris pushed us to the edge of the discipline, we had a good overview of what was possible and where the discipline tends to go. 

One of his students, Ceferino Varón González, made also a little presentation about the usefulness of morphometrics to decipher phylogenetic relations. The answer was not really good for paleontologists, shape only is rarely a good tool to understand taxa relationships. Geometric Morphometrics should only be used with the purpose to understand changes of shape obtaining a phylogenetic tree. Unfortunately, DNA is rarely accessible with fossil species, in the future, we will have to manage this problem with integrative projects for example. 

The other participants were really nice and I learned as much from them than from the course. I think we all enjoyed the experience and the place. the food was really (really) good and everyone was happy to be here. I especially thank Soledad, the manager of the courses in Transmitting Science which does a very good job. 

 Here is the link for the structure Transmitting Science: http://www.transmittingscience.org 

And the opinion of one of the other participants : 

“I basically learned geometric morphometrics by reading text books, but I had a lot of questions that I wanted to ask to a specialist for years. On the other hand, the instructor of the course, Professor Chris Klingenberg, is one of the leading scientists in the field of geometric morphometrics and I always wanted to meet him. I think that the course setting (lectures in the morning and demonstrations in the afternoon) was very effective to understand how to apply what we learned to our own data-sets. I also appreciate that the instructor took enough time for question and answer sessions for each section of his lecture. I could ask all the questions that I wanted to ask and I also learned a lot from questions from other participants. In addition to the course itself, exchange between the participants and the location of the course were very nice. I really enjoyed the whole experience there.” 

Dr. Kazuo Takahashi, Okayama University, Japan (Geometric Morphometrics and Phylogeny - 4th Edition). 

 If you wish to attend this course (or any in Transmitting Science), know that you can get a 10% discount: Transmitting Science hopes to be better known by this way.
You just need to cite me (Benjamin Ramassamy) as "Colleague"in the comment field in the registration form.

Once upon a time, in Gram, was living a whale…

Hello everyone, I am Benjamin Ramassamy, a new PhD from France working at the Museum of Natural History and Palaeontology in Gram. My project is about the evolution of beaked whales and especially what clues the specimens from the Gram formation can bring in our understanding of their history. 

The beaked whales are the 2nd most diversified family among Cetaceans with at least 21 extant species. Still, we know almost nothing about them. It is due to their ecology: they are specialized to perform deep dives for food foraging, which makes them difficult to observe. Recent studies show that this family was more diversified in the past in terms of morphology and species, but the group was already specialized to the life in depth early in its history. 

 On Wednesday, the 9th of April 1986, a new fossil whale was discovered in the Gram claypit. It took 4 days to dig it out and it has been identified as a beaked whale. This discovery is particularly interesting: indeed, at this period (10 million years ago), Denmark was under water, but it was shallower than where beaked whales are foraging today. Why is a member of a family of deep divers present here? It is one of the questions I want to answer. Currently, the bones constituting the beak of these whales are very dense. This has been hypothesized to be an adaptation for deep diving, but it is also present in the Gram specimen. The function of these dense bones was probably more complex and I expect to find the answer in the material that I am studying. 

 This work is important to better understand the past ecology of this group, but it also valorizes the fossil register of the south of Jutland: the Gram claypit has already shown its richness with the discovery of several exclusive species from here. It is important to preserve this fossil record. Palaeontology gives us the possibility to study morphological changes through time, a data, only available with fossils. It is another way to understand the situation of the beaked whales today: how they adapted to their present ecology. Understanding how they reacted to environmental changes can validate models trying to predict how they will react in the future. 

Paleontology is not only for scientists: everyone can participate. It’s making the work in Gram enjoyable. I can see that people are still curious and interested about the fate of a whale that lived in the south of Jutland 10 million years ago.