ELT COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: RESTRUCTURING OF TERRESTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS FOLLOWING THE PERMIAN-TRIASSIC MASS EXTINCTION.
Christian Sidor, University of Washington Peter Roopnarine, California Academy Kenneth Angielczyk, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois Sterling Nesbitt, Virginia Technological University
Understanding the broad-scale effects of climate change in deep time (between 245 and 120 million years ago) and its associated mass extinction, on terrestrial communities has been hindered by the lack of high-quality regional or global-scale data, as nearly all studies have been restricted to sequences in Russia or South Africa. This research will build on six prior seasons of fieldwork in Tanzania and Zambia (together TZAM) to bring new data to bear on this major linked event of environmental, climatic, and biotic change. Our team will gather multidisciplinary data (sedimentological, geochemical, vertebrate paleontological, paleobotanical, and geochronological) during two proposed seasons of fieldwork. In the lab, we will use geographic distribution and community food web models to address more general questions about mass extinctions and their subsequent recoveries. For example, do mass extinctions consistently cause certain types of community restructuring or do their effects vary with environment and geography? Does the ecological rebuilding of terrestrial communities proceed in a stereotyped way, regardless of the exact identities of the species involved? Answering these types of questions is an important step in the process of moving from documenting the causes and effects of this extinction event, to using it as a source of predictive information for dealing with modern biotic crises. Vertebrate paleontology fascinates the public. Because of their visibility, dissemination of our results to the general public will primarily occur at the natural history museums involved in the project. In collaboration with the exhibits departments at the Field Museum and Burke Museum, we will create two exhibit installations focusing on Asilisaurus kongwe, a small dinosaur relative from Tanzania that is an icon of our research project. At the conclusion of the grant, the installations will be permanently transferred to the National Museum of Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), and the Livingstone Museum (Livingstone, Zambia) where they will introduce local citizens to the rich paleontological heritage of their nations. We will also develop a level of the FMNH's paleontology video game Game of Bones focusing on Asilisaurus. The game level will be centered around discovering and excavating a specimen of Asilisaurus, reconstructing its anatomy, and making inferences about its paleobiology. The game level will be promoted on the main websites of the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), University of Washington Burke Museum (UWBM), and the California Academy of Science (CAS), the museums' social media sites, and web pages targeting science enthusiasts (e.g., FMNH: Science@FMNH, The Field Revealed; UWBM: BurkeBlog; CAS: Science Today and Science in Action).
