Lab News

Welcome to research interns Solène Bourdas and Leo Laborieux

March 01, 2024

We are delighted to extend a warm welcome to our Spring 2024 research interns Solène Bourdas and Leo Laborieux, who will be working alongside graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in some of the exciting projects in the lab. Solène is currently...

Walcott Rust fossils reveal secrets of trilobite enrolment

December 20, 2023

How did trilobites curl up into a protective ball? The great diversity of trilobite fossils has answered this question thanks to their durable biomineralized dorsal exoskeleton, but what happens underneath has been a mystery for over a hundred years...

Welcome to new graduate student Edna Rodriguez-Sánchez

September 01, 2023

We are excited to welcome Edna Rodriguez-Sánchez as the newest graduate student on our team! Edna completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in biology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and will join our effots to understand the...

Maddi Waskom submits senior thesis

November 04, 2022

Congratulations to undergraduate researcher Madeleine (Maddi) Waskom, who earlier this month submitted her senior thesis entitled " Stuck in the mud: experimental taphonomy and computed tomography demonstrate the critical role of sediment in carcass...

Modified legs show that trilobites mated like horseshoe crabs

July 27, 2022

Graduate student Sarah Losso has made quite a splash during summer 2022 with the publication of her work exploring the evolutionary significance of highly modified limbs in the trilobite Olenoides serratus from the mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale in British...

Palaeontological Associaton Annual Meeting in Cork

July 26, 2022

After two years of remote-format conferences, the Harvard IP lab had a great representation at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Palaeontological Association hosted at University College Cork in Ireland, and superbly organized by Dr. Maria McNamara and her...

Dean's Competitive Fund Spring 2022 awarded to study exceptional fossils in a nearshore setting

May 02, 2022

Today we received the exciting news that the Dean's Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship will support our ongoing project entitled " Revealing the Nearshore Cradle of Animal Evolution: A New Exceptionally Preserved Soft-Bodied Fossil Biota From the...

Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Grant to study the water to land transition in euarthropods

March 17, 2022

This week we received the fantastic news that the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) will support an international effort to understand the water to land transition in euarthropods, with emphasis on the evolution of respiratory systems! This highly...

Cambrian fossils illuminate the ancestral nervous system of chelicerates (UPDATED)

January 21, 2022

We start off 2022 with a new Open Access publication in Nature Communications describing the exceptionally preserved nervous system of the soft-bodied euarthropod Mollisonia symmetrica from the mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale, featuring some stunning material...

IP lab on the cover of the MCZ Annual report 2020-2021

December 17, 2021

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...

Exceptional fossil invertebrates in amber

October 22, 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...

Fezouata starfish featured in PBS Eons

August 24, 2021

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...