The Museum of Comparative Zoology Annual Report for 2020-2021 is now freely available online HERE, and we are honoured that one of the new species described by the lab is featured in the cover! We first came across Thelxiope holmani during the field excursion to the mid-Cambrian Wheeler Formation as part of NAPC 2019 in Riverside, and have since published an... Read more about IP lab on the cover of the MCZ Annual report 2020-2021

The last few weeks have been full of exciting discoveries on exceptionally preserved invertebrate fossils in amber inclusions. First, graduate student Marc A. Mapalo published a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B describing the third-ever named species of tardigrade from Miocene-aged (ca. 16 million years old) amber from the Dominican Republic....

Read more about Exceptional fossil invertebrates in amber

Check out the latest installment of PBS Eons addressing the evolution of the earliest echinoderms, more specifically how starfish got their arms! We are particularly excited as the cover artwork, as well as a good chunk of the video, features our recent work on the early Ordovician somasteroid (stem-group asterozoan) Cantabrigiaster fezouataensis, from the Fezouata biota in Morocco. You can check out the original publication in Biology Letters describing this...

Read more about Fezouata starfish featured in PBS Eons

The past month has seen the publication of two exciting studies focusing on the preservation and evolutionary significance of fossilized central nervous systems. First, a collaboration with Dr. Russell Bicknell (University of New England) and colleagues, on the discovery of an exceptionally preserved brain in the extinct horseshoe crab Euproops danae from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek deposit in Illinois. The study published in ...

Read more about Fossil nervous systems galore

We are delighted to wecome Dr. Karma Nanglu as the newest member of the Laboratory for Invertebrate Paleobiology and Evolution. Karma recently completed a prestigious Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, and completed his PhD at the University of Toronto while working on exceptional soft-bodied fossils and community analyses of the famous Burgess Shale. Karma's ecological knowledge and skillset will play a critical role in our activities studying the early Ordovician Fezouata biota of Morocco and its...

Read more about Dr. Karma Nanglu joins our team