#blastoids

Here are a few of my favorite fossils I found in the creek last year. Ones I don’t think I’ve already shared photos of, at least! 

killed too many legends

IN MEMORIAM:

blastoids

eurypterids

trilobites

Day 2 in the collections started with the weird, the beautiful, the Permian. The Permian (298-251 million years ago) is a special time for blastoids (and most of life). BUT specifically blastoids. So, they reached their peak in diversity during the Mississippian (346-323 million years ago) and only two species (ish) have been recorded from the time in between (the Pennsylvanian). 

These bizarre looking blastoids are some of the products during the Permian. Most blastoids have a bilaterial symmetry (pseudo-fivefold) but are lacking the really big extensions off the body. These critters also have bumps ALL over them, so strange and cute. Their plate arrangements are similar to other blastoids but in these creatures they are stacked like pancakes! 

The only other blastoid talk at GSA! By the renowned Dave Meyer! I was so excited someone else was talking about blastoids! He was particularly interested in looking at food particle size and blastoid morphology. Blastoids have these little arm like projections called brachioles. As of right now it’s unclear if they act like a straw funneling stuff toward their mouth with a generated current or if they sort of passively collect food - slowly shuttling it to their mouths. 

So the brachioles are made up of thousands of teeny tiny plates and these plates essentially create a straw - there is a tiny hole in the middle. So that straw hole limits the size of food that can get in it - we are talking plankton and random bits of nutrients these were not large creatures. 

Dave was using the straw size as an indicator of where in the ecosystem these creatures fit in and how this changed through the Paleozoic. Very cool! And Dave is a very supportive person, we had a good blastoid chat later in the meeting =]

Check out his abstract here: https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2018AM/webprogram/Paper320448.html

More info on blastoids: https://timescavengers.blog/paleo-live/our-research-explained/blastoidea/ 

I usually am better about blogging while I am away but holy cow it has been an exhausting week. I’ll catch you up before really getting into my work today. 

I flew in on Sunday to Hartford and took a shuttle down to New Haven. It was incredibly cold, dry, and rainy all at the same time. I almost only brought sandals... luckily Jeb was the voice of reason and got me to bring my boots. The guest house I am staying in is run by a wonderful woman who essentially has treated me like family while I’ve been here. 

The first day in the collections was really tough, this was my first big adventure into the blastoid world (that wasn’t trying to rebuild their respiratory structures) and I was very overwhelmed. For whatever reason I decided to start with one of the most confusing ones right off the bat! It took me all day to get through the bunch of specimens but then I felt like I could keep moving forward. 

I’ve been working from about 8:15-8:30 AM to about 6-6:30 PM every night. I essentially sit in front of a microscope, record what I see in my spread sheet, and repeat! All day! Naturally, I’ve been getting really bad microscope-induced headaches. I was smart this trip and actually brought a bottle of aspirin with me. 

Jeb made it up here on Wednesday evening and has been doing a little ‘beer-cation’ the past two days. There are many famous breweries up here in the northeast. We have had a few so far and they were ALL delicious, most of them tasted like juice! We are also trying to sample the apizza that New Haven is so famous for. We have tried a ‘veggie bomb’ from Modern Apizza and a clam pizza from Da Legna both were very good.

I’m going to try to get through my last set of specimens by ~1 or 2 PM so that I can go wander around New Haven a bit before we take off! Tomorrow morning we are meeting Adriane and Jacob for breakfast! I’m so excited! Then we have one last beer run and our flight leaves around 5:30 PM. Jeb is trying to figure out where to go to buy packing supplies for all the beer he has gotten. He’s convinced we will be able to check it all with little to no problems... I’m not convinced it will go as smoothly has he thinks it will. 

The Blastoids by Ernst Haeckel