Abstract Booklet for Download:
Underlined author denotes designated speaker. | *Candidates for the President’s Prize are marked with an asterisk.
Underlined author denotes designated speaker. | *Candidates for the President’s Prize are marked with an asterisk.
This page features the full talk schedule for the Annual Meeting. All times are in British Summer Time. A schedule of the event as a whole, and the non-talk events is available on the page Schedule - Overview.
The talk schedule is as follows:
Wednesday 13th September
Registration for the conference will be available in the Entrance Foyer of West Road Concert Hall, West Road, from 08:00 – 17:30.
| 08:00 – 09:00 | Poster set-up in West Road Concert Hall (multiple adjacent rooms). |
|---|
Session 1
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall.
| 09:00 – 09:15 | The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system Edmund R.R. Moody, Holly Betts, James Clark, Nina Dombrowski, Stuart Daines, Richard Boyle et al. |
|---|---|
| 09:15 – 9:30 | Ediacaran marine animal forests and the ventilation of the oceans Susana Gutarra, Emily G. Mitchell, Frances S. Dunn, Brandt M. Gibson, Rachel A. Racicot, Simon A.F. Darroch and Imran Rahman |
| 09:30 – 09:45 | Juvenile arthropleurids from the Montceau-les-Mines Lagerstätte (305 Ma) help explain the phylogenetic affinities of these giants myriapods *Mickaël Lheritier, Adrien Buisson, Alexis Gerbe, Jean Vannier, Gilles Escarguel, Gregory D. Edgecombe et al. |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Estimating the origin of angiosperms based on quantitative analysis of the fossil records and the molecular clock *Ruolin Wu, Daniele Silvestro, Harald Schneider, Yue Tong, Shan Wan, Davide Pisani and Philip C.J. Donoghue |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Repeated evolution of extreme sabre-tooth morphology explained by optimality Tahlia Pollock, William Deakin, Narimane Chatar, Pablo S. Milla Carmona, Olga Panagiotopoulou, William M.G. Parker et al. |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | Predicting extinction risk by range loss: evidence from the fossil record Eileen Straube, Gregor Mathes and Manuel Steinbauer |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Tea/coffee break (Foyer, West Road Concert Hall) |
Session 2A
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Neoselachian diversification dynamics and age dependent extinction *Kristína Kocáková, Daniele Silvestro, Amanda M. Gardiner, Jaime A. Villafaña and Catalina Pimiento |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Iron-coated varanid teeth and the dental specializations of ziphodont reptiles Aaron LeBlanc, Alexander P. Morrell, Slobodan Sirovica, David Labonte, Domenic D’Amore and Owen Addison |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Ontogeny and tooth replacement in the Brazilian cynodont Brasilodon quadrangularis Nuria Melisa Morales Garcia, Agustin G. Martinelli, Pamela G. Gill, Heitor Francischini, Pedro H. Fonseca, Ian J. Corfe and Emily J. Rayfield |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Tempo and mode in the evolution of dinosaurian (Archosauria: Dinosauria) climatic niche landscape Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Alexander J. Farnsworth, Lewis A. Jones, Juan L. Cantalapiedra, Sara Gamboa, Sofía Galvan et al. |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Evaluating homoplasy and evolutionary constraint in the passerine bird appendicular skeleton *Elizabeth Steell, Neil Brocklehurst, Roger B.J. Benson, Matthieu Chotard, Jacqueline Nguyen and Daniel J. Field |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. LGBTQ+ meet up |
Session 2B
Lecture theatre LG18, Law Faculty.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Reconstructing the phylogeny of longest existing gastropod group Pleurotomariida (Ordovician–Recent) with Parsimony and Bayesian methods *Baran Karapunar, Sebastian Höhna and Alexander Nützel |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | The secret history of sea spiders (Arthropoda: Pycnogonida) Romain Sabroux, Morena Nava, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Russell J. Garwood, Philip C.J. Donoghue, Derek J. Siveter et al. |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Euarthropod horseshoe carapace convergence shaped by hydrodynamics? Stephen Pates and Harriet B. Drage |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Developmental and functional constraints drove ontogenetic change in protective enrolment in an ancient arthropod Jorge Esteve and Nigel C. Hughes |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Convergent ventral adaptations for enrolment in trilobites, crustaceans and millipedes – insights from the Middle Ordovician Walcott-Rust Lagerstätte *Sarah Losso, Pauline Affatato, Karma Nanglu and Javier Ortega-Hernández |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. LGBTQ+ meet up |
Session 2C
Lecture theatre LG19, Law Faculty.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | A new rangeomorph from Newfoundland illuminates the origin of a lost body-plan Frances S. Dunn, Luke A. Parry and Alexander G. Liu |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Community development in the Avalonian Ediacaran *Nile Stephenson, Katie M. Delahooke, Charlotte G. Kenchington, Andrea Manica and Emily G. Mitchell |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Macroalgae, cyanobacteria and a late Ediacaran ‘diversity crisis’ in the Mackenzie Mountains, NW Canada Heda Agić, Martin R. Smith and Alex Kovalick |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Reconstructing the skeletal and soft tissue of the Ediacaran metazoan Namacalathus *Ruaridh Alexander and Rachel A. Wood |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | No mass extinction at the Ediacaran-Cambrian boundary *Mariana Yilales, Fred Bowyer and Rachel A. Wood |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. LGBTQ+ meet up |
Session 3A
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall
| 13:30 – 13:45 | A new species of actinopterygian from the Upper Carboniferous (Bashkirian) of northern England, and the problem of phylogenetically forgotten fishes *Struan Henderson and Sam Giles |
|---|---|
| 13:45 – 14:00 | Extreme lower jaw elongation in a ‘placoderm’ reflects high disparity in early vertebrate evolution *Melina E.M. Jobbins, Martin Rücklin, Hervé Lelièvre, Eileen Grogan, Piotr Szrek and Christian Klug |
| 14:00 – 14:15 | Resorption and remodelling in the dermal skeleton of an early chondrichthyan Plamen Andreev, Qiang Li, Wenjin Zhao, Lijian Peng, Lars Brakenhoff, Martin Rücklin et al. |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | Reconstructing feeding behaviour and diet in Devonian ctenacanth chondrichthyans using tooth wear analysis and finite element analysis *Merle Greif, Ivan Calandra, Stephan Lautenschlager, Thomas Kaiser and Christian Klug |
| 14:30 – 14:45 | Testing hypotheses on heterostracan feeding *Madleen Grohganz, Antonio Ballell, Humberto G. Ferron, Zerina Johanson, Emily J. Rayfield and Philip C.J. Donoghue |
| 14:45 – 15:00 | How has shark functional diversity changed through geological time? Jack Cooper and Catalina Pimiento |
| 15:00 – 16:30 | Tea/coffee break and dedicated poster session. Foyer and adjacent rooms, West Road Concert Hall |
Session 3B
Lecture theatre LG18, Law Faculty
| 13:30 – 13:45 | ‘morphospace’: an R package for building and depicting multivariate ordinations of shape data Pablo S. Milla Carmona, Oscar E.R. Lehmann, William Deakin, Eduardo M. Soto, Ignacio M. Soto, Philip C.J. Donoghue and Emily J. Rayfield |
|---|---|
| 13:45 – 14:00 | Fossilization can mislead analyses of phenotypic disparity *Thomas J. Smith, Robert S. Sansom, Davide Pisani and Philip C.J. Donoghue |
| 14:00 – 14:15 | Temporal trajectory of geographic occupancy is an informative predictor of extinction risk across fossil microplankton taxa Isaiah Smith, Ádám T. Kocsis and Wolfgang Kiessling |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | Carboniferous wildfire revisited: wildfire, post-fire erosion and deposition in a Mississippian crater lake Andrew C. Scott |
| 14:30 – 14:45 | Climate-mediated vegetation changes during the Smithian–Spathian cooling event (c. 249.2 Ma) at southern subpolar latitudes (Sydney Basin, Australia) *Marcos Amores, Tracy D. Frank, Christopher R. Fielding and Chris Mays |
| 14:45 – 15:00 | A century of imaging the Rhynie Chert: using confocal microscopy to model the first land animals, plants and fungi in 3D *Emma J. Long, Gregory D. Edgecombe, Paul Kenrick, Alexander D. Ball and Xiaoya Ma |
| 15:00 – 16:30 | Tea/coffee break and dedicated poster session. Foyer and adjacent rooms, West Road Concert Hall |
Session 3C
Lecture theatre LG19, Law Faculty
| 13:30 – 13:45 | Tooth origins and the convergent evolution of sensory structures *Yara Haridy, Karma Nanglu, Mark Rivers, Javier Ortega-Hernández and Neil Shubin |
|---|---|
| 13:45 – 14:00 | Preservation of the organic carbon remains in the Chengjiang biota – an integrated story *Xiangtong Lei, Peiyun Cong, Wenwen Wen and Fan Wei |
| 14:00 – 14:15 | Integration and modularity in the Cambrian diversification of arthropods *Joseph Moysiuk and Jean-Bernard Caron |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | A look inside the ancestral arthropod Martin R. Smith, Emma J. Long, Alavya Dhungana and Katherine J. Dobson |
| 14:30 – 14:45 | A fresh North American view into the Cambrian Explosion – new insights from the Drumian Marjum Konservat-Lagerstätte of western Utah, USA Rudy Lerosey Aubril, Robert Coleman, Lucas del Mouro, Robert Gaines, Luke A. Parry, Jacob Skabelund and Javier Ortega-Hernández |
| 14:45 – 15:00 | The non-cryptic, diachronous origins of animal phyla *Alavya Dhungana and Martin R. Smith |
| 15:00 – 16:30 | Tea/coffee break and dedicated poster session. Foyer and adjacent rooms, West Road Concert Hall |
Annual Address
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall.
| 16:30 – 17:30 | Fossils, molecules and arthropods Gregory D. Edgecombe |
|---|
Annual Dinner
Girton College, Huntingdon Road.
| 18:30 | Coach transport from Queen’s Road, next to the Silver Street junction |
|---|---|
| 18.50 – 19:30 | Reception in the Fellows’ Gardens, Girton College |
| 19:45 – 22:30 | Dinner and President’s speech |
| 22:30 | Return transport to Cambridge city centre (Queen’s Road, next to the Silver Street junction), close to local bars. A shuttle service will operate from Girton College bringing delegates back also at c. 23:00, and 23:30. |
Thursday 14th September
Registration for the conference will be available in the Entrance Foyer of West Road Concert Hall, West Road, from 08:00 – 17:30.
Session 4A
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall.
| 09:00 – 09:15 | Landmark-free morphometrics suggests different paths of mammalian evolution through the Cenozoic *James M. Mulqueeney, Thomas H.G. Ezard and Anjali Goswami |
|---|---|
| 09:15 – 9:30 | Dietary niche shifts are coincident with mammalian body size reduction during a Paleocene hyperthermal *Neil F. Adams, Stephen L. Brusatte, Thomas E. Williamson, Ross Secord and Mark A. Purnell |
| 09:30 – 09:45 | Regional aridification drove changes in Asian mammal faunas by the middle Eocene. Implications for the timing and magnitude of the Mongolian Remodelling Gemma L. Benevento, Niels Meijer, Julia Brugger, Andreas Mulch, Thomas Hickler and Susanne Fritz |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Indications for major 'out of Asia' proboscidean migrations during the Middle Miocene *Nora Carolin and Sunil Bajpai |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | The virtual endocast of the Late Miocene hedgehog Postpalerinaceus vireti (Eulipotyphla, Mammalia) Raquel Moya Costa, Ornella C. Bertrand, Àngel H. Luján, Isaac Casanovas-Vilar and Marc Furió |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | Cementochronology reveals the evolution of life history amongst the earliest mammals Pamela G. Gill, Elis Newham, Philippa Brewer, Julia Schultz, Kai Jaeger, Ian J. Corfe and Thomas Martin |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Tea/coffee break (Foyer, West Road Concert Hall) |
Session 4B
Lecture theatre LG18, Law Faculty.
| 09:00 – 09:15 | Understanding fossil preservation patterns and processes using decay experimentation Allison C. Daley, Orla G. Bath Enright, Harriet B. Drage, Farid Saleh and Jonathan B. Antcliffe |
|---|---|
| 09:15 – 9:30 | Life after death: characterizing the microbial communities responsible for decomposition and fossilization Robert S. Sansom, Chris Boothman and Sophie Nixon |
| 09:30 – 09:45 | Proliferation of microbial collagenase as a constraint on soft tissue preservation *Philip B. Vixseboxse, Edmund R.R. Moody, Philip C.J. Donoghue, Sean McMahon and Alexander G. Liu |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Kaolinite causes mineralization and stabilization of soft tissues within days during marine shrimp decay experiments Nora Corthésy, Farid Saleh, Allison C. Daley and Jonathan B. Antcliffe |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | A new taphonomic model for the Eocene Geiseltal Konservat-Lagerstätte (Germany) *Daniel Falk, Oliver Wings and Maria E. McNamara |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | The experimental effects of wave processes on arthropod taphonomy: implications for Lagerstätten and small carbonaceous fossils *Laura Devine and Nicholas Minter |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Tea/coffee break (Foyer, West Road Concert Hall) |
Session 4C
Lecture theatre LG19, Law Faculty.
| 09:00 – 09:15 | An Ordovician vertebrate neurocranium Richard P. Dearden, Agnese Lanzetti, Sam Giles, Zerina Johanson, Andy Jones, Stephan Lautenschlager et al. |
|---|---|
| 09:15 – 9:30 | A new luolishaniid from the early Ordovician and the autecology of suspension feeding lobopodians *Jared Richards and Javier Ortega-Hernández |
| 09:30 – 09:45 | Epibionts and trace fossils on stem- and crown-group euarthropod carapaces from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Shale *Jonathan Pople, Gaëtan J.-M. Potin and Allison C. Daley |
| 09:45 – 10:00 | Trilobite mass extinction events in the Early Ordovician (Tremadocian) of North America Jonathan M. Adrain and *Francesc Pérez-Peris |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Two new Lagerstätten shed light on Ordovician animal ecosystems Farid Saleh |
| 10:15 – 10:30 | An early Palaeozoic ostracod psychrosphere? *Anna McGairy, Christopher P. Stocker, Mark Williams, Phong Duc Nguyen, Thomas H.P. Harvey, Toshifumi Komatsu and C. Giles Miller |
| 10:30 – 11:00 | Tea/coffee break (Foyer, West Road Concert Hall) |
Session 5A
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Anatomy of the skeleton and soft tissues of a 290-million-year-old amphibian revealed using elemental and multispectral imaging *Antoine Logghe, Pierre Gueriau, Phillip L. Manning, Roy Wogelius, Victoria M. Egerton, Uwe Bergmann et al. |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Melanosome geometry informs on the functional evolution of melanin in Reptilia and Amphibia *Aaron Quigley, Beatriz Carazo del Hoyo, Daniel Cirtina, Catherine McCarney, Jane Brennan, Soudeh Ziapour and Maria E. McNamara |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Characterization of melanin-based colour expression and melanosome attributes across the avian phylogeny *Hollie Bean, Daniel J. Field and Maria E. McNamara |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Trait-mediated speciation and human-driven extinctions in proboscideans revealed by unsupervised Bayesian neural networks Torsten Hauffe, Juan L. Cantalapiedra, Fernando Blanco and Daniele Silvestro |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | A new approach to the reconstruction of fragmentary fossil long bones; the case study of Homo naledi Julia Aramendi and Lloyd A. Courtenay |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. |
Session 5B
Lecture theatre LG18, Law Faculty.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Organic-walled microfossils of the late Palaeoproterozoic Limbunya Group and implications for early eukaryotic evolution Leigh Anne Riedman, Susannah M. Porter, Angelo Dos Santos, Maxwell A. Lechte and Galen P. Halverson |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | Multicellular microfossils from the ca. 930–820-million-year-old Veteranen Group of Svalbard Ross P. Anderson, George O. Wedlake, Luke A. Parry, Timothy M. Gibson, Alexie E.G. Millikin, Karsten Piepjohn et al. |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Heterochronic processes in the evolution of planktonic foraminifera Bridget S. Wade, Christopher Poole, Thomas Ezard and Anieke Brombacher |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Enigmatic Silurian jawless vertebrate Lasanius evaluated with new synchrotron data *Jane Reeves, Roy A. Wogelius, Joseph N. Keating, Phillip L. Manning and Robert S. Sansom |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Current issues with conodont tissues *Bryan Shirley and Emilia Jarochowska |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. |
Session 5C
Lecture theatre LG19, Law Faculty.
| 11:00 – 11:15 | Osedax bioerosion in marine reptiles: the evolution of an ecosystem engineer *Sarah Jamison-Todd, Adrian Glover, Philip D. Mannion and Paul Upchurch |
|---|---|
| 11:15 – 11:30 | From the tiny ant to the elephant: engineering impacts of the vertebrate and invertebrate denizens of Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems Anthony Shillito and Maximiliano Paz |
| 11:30 – 11:45 | Insect diversity from the late Eocene Xiede locality (central Tibetan Plateau) and a preliminary review of Hymenoptera *Xiaoting Xu, Isabelle Deregnaucourt, Jérémie Bardin, Cecilia Waichert, Alexandre Somavilla, James M. Carpenter et al. |
| 11:45 – 12:00 | Palaeoecologic turnovers in the Ediacaran-Cambrian Chapel Island Formation, Newfoundland (Canada) and the early steps of the Cambrian Explosion *Romain Gougeon, M. Gabriela Mángano, Luis A. Buatois, Guy M. Narbonne, Brittany A. Laing and Maximiliano Paz |
| 12:00 – 12:15 | Early Cambrian trace fossils in shallow-marine quartzites from Baltica and their implications for sedimentary stasis and anactualistic sedimentation *Yorick Veenma, Neil S. Davies, Ben J. Slater and Graham E. Budd |
| 12:15 – 13:30 | Lunch, West Road Concert Hall foyer. |
Session 6
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall
| 13:30 – 13:45 | Bretskyan hierarchy—the structure and evolution of biota in time and space Andrej Spiridonov and Niles Eldredge |
|---|---|
| 13:45 – 14:00 | Unveiling the third eye of the earliest vertebrates *Sihang Zhang, Xiangtong Lei, Peiyun Cong, Jakob Vinther and Sarah E. Gabbott |
| 14:00 – 14:15 | Challenges of ancestral state estimation: the practical case of feather evolution Pierre Cockx, Joseph N. Keating and Michael J. Benton |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | The impact of fossil tips on reconstructing trait evolution using phylogenetic comparative methods Bethany J. Allen, William Gearty, Pedro Godoy and Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza |
| 14:30 – 14:45 | Ecosystem structural changes following a marine megafaunal extinction *Amy E. Shipley, Tracy Aze, Catalina Pimiento, Andrew P. Beckerman, Jennifer A. Dunne, Jack O. Shaw and Alexander M. Dunhill |
| 14:45 – 15:00 | Echoes from the past: unveiling deep-time functional dynamics through network analysis *Fernando Blanco, Johannes Müller, Daniele Silvestro and Juan L. Cantalapiedra |
| 15:00 – 15:30 | Tea/coffee break and taking down of posters Foyer, West Road Concert Hall |
Session 7
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall
| 15:30 – 15:45 | Evolution in the mesopelagic twilight zone is regulated by a temperature-dependent biological pump Paul N. Pearson, Bridget S. Wade, Flavia Boscolo-Galazzo, Katherine Crichton, Tom Dunkley Jones, Eleanor John et al. |
|---|---|
| 15:45 – 16:00 | A new quantitative framework to determine the producers of marine locomotory trace fossils Zekun Wang and Imran Rahman |
| 16:00 – 16:15 | Exceptional preservation in the Rhynie chert: molecular fingerprints resolved in situ down to sub-micron scales Corentin Loron, Ferenc Borondics, Edwin Rodriguez Dzul, Patrick J. Orr, Andrei V. Gromov, Nick C. Fraser and Sean McMahon |
| 16:15 – 16:30 | Palynofloral change through the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming Vera Korasidis and Scott L. Wing |
| 16:30 – 16:45 | Early tetrapod jaw shape and mechanical performance during the water-land transition Laura B. Porro and Emily J. Rayfield |
Closing business
Auditorium, West Road Concert Hall
| 16:45 – 16:50 | Presentation from the PalAss Council Diversity Officer |
|---|---|
| 16:50 – 17:05 | Presentation from the organizing committee of PalAss 2024 |
| 17:05 – 17:15 | Presentation of the President’s Prize and the Council Poster Prize followed by closing remarks |