Faculty
Faculty of Science
Supervisor Name
Jisuo Jin and Cameron Tsujita
Keywords
Ordovician, Silurian, Pentamerid, Brachiopod, MicroCT
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Description
Following the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, most of the large brachiopod groups of the Ordovician were wiped out. The few survivors left to pick up the pieces very quickly evolved in the Silurian. The Pentamerids in particular rapidly diversified and became a dominant presence in Earth's oceans for the next tens of millions of years. Resolving how these groups of Pentamerids, or superfamilies, emerged following the extinction has been a difficult task, as the ancestors of the main superfamilies all look very similar externally at the start of the Silurian. However, the internal structures in brachiopods of these superfamilies are noticeably different, and utilizing a technique like MicroCT, we can peer inside these fossils and obtain a better understanding of their phylogenetic relationship based on the orientation and shape of these internal structures.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Western USRI Program, to my supervisors Dr Jisuo Jin and Dr Cam Tsujita, and a special thanks to Dr Roberta Flemming, for encouraging me to pursue the USRI program in the first place.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Document Type
Poster
Using MicroCT to Analyze the Anatomy of Pentamerid Brachiopods
Following the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction, most of the large brachiopod groups of the Ordovician were wiped out. The few survivors left to pick up the pieces very quickly evolved in the Silurian. The Pentamerids in particular rapidly diversified and became a dominant presence in Earth's oceans for the next tens of millions of years. Resolving how these groups of Pentamerids, or superfamilies, emerged following the extinction has been a difficult task, as the ancestors of the main superfamilies all look very similar externally at the start of the Silurian. However, the internal structures in brachiopods of these superfamilies are noticeably different, and utilizing a technique like MicroCT, we can peer inside these fossils and obtain a better understanding of their phylogenetic relationship based on the orientation and shape of these internal structures.