9520457 HICKMAN This award will contribute support to the doctoral dissertation research of a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The award will provide minor funding for supplies and will enable the student to visit and study major collections of fossil mollusk material in the United States as well as the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland where important paleontological holdings are found. This is an important study because the student will be attempting to assess sampling strategies and compare methods for estimating biodiversity for extinct faunas of gastropods. Establishing reliability of such methods is very important for addressing faunal change through geological time and especially for investigating Neogene mass extinctions in the western Atlantic. %%% This award will contribute to the research training of a young paleontologist. More importantly, the work of this particular student could be very important for other more senior researchers in establishing methods for estimating biodiversity in fossil communities. ***
