On the 24th and 25th of November a meeting of all the ESRs will take place in Granada, Spain. The main aim is to discuss cooperative publications and the interchange of data and ideas. Attached you find the programme and travel infos.
Pending confirmation from the Research Executive Agency in Brussels, the Throughflow ITN midterm meeting will be held on January 23, 2012 at NCB Naturalis in Leiden. Check back in the next few weeks for more information about logistics and the meeting agenda. See the attached document for more information about the midterm review process.
We are happy to announce that our second shipment of samples from Indonesia have arrived safely! Yesterday morning our container filled with 93 crates was brought to NCB Naturalis. Crates were unloaded and divided according to different institutions and are now waiting for further shipment to their eager researchers!
In order to start our connexion with Utrecht University as part of our PhD activities, we will have a meeting on next Tuesday 4 October. A general overview of the project will be presented by Willem Renema, followed by talks about the geology of the Mahakan Delta (Nathan Marshall), as well as the biodiversity of Foraminifera (Vibor Novak), Mollusca (Sonja Reich), Bryozoa (Emanuela Di Martino), and Corals (Nadia Santodomingo). In addition, Viola Warter will show some preliminary results about the geochemistry.
I am happy to announce that my poster "Molluscs from meadows - An Early Miocene seagrass mollusc association from Java, Indonesia" won the student poster contest at the "82. Jahrestagung der Paläontologischen Gesellschaft" (82nd annual meeting of the German palaeontological society) in Vienna with more than 25% of the votes.
Viola joined the project at the beginning of this month, and she will cover the geochemistry component at the Royal Holloway University. She is visiting today the Natural History Museum, and I took advantage to take a picture with one of our nice Coral samples!
This is the ship carrying our samples from Singapore to Rotterdam. currently near the Suez Canal, in a week time it (he/she?) will arrive in Rotterdam
Today our samples which had been collected in Bontang, Bengalon and
Sangkuliran started their journey to Balikpapan where they will go on board
in direction of Europe. A total of 74 wooden and plastic boxes filled up with fossils
and sediment samples were loaded on a truck. Each box has an average weight
of 50 kg which makes a total of about 3.7t! And it’s still not all! The hard work
of moving all the material was greatly performed by Ken, Willem, Aries, Asep, two
If you want to study the development of biodiversity from the fossil record
you must be sure you do so within environments. It makes no sense to compare
diversity in a fifteen year old mangrove environment with diversity in a
five million year old coral reef. Characterising environments is therefore
one of the goals of the current expedition. We do so by combining
sedimentological and palaeontological data we retrieve from the layers.
Sonja works on Miocene mollusk faunas from amongst others seagrasses. But
how to determine that it is actually a seagrass fauna? One way is to find
seagrass remains associated with the faunas, which we probably did in two
occasions. The seagrass leaves must still be checked by a palaeobotanist
though. However, in one of the sites where we collected purported seagrass
leaves, also a different leaf showed up. One that does resemble mangrove
leaves strongly, an identification that also will have to be confirmed by a
