Meet the Museum: Molecular Insights into Ancient Life
How similar are ancient ferns to those we see today?
We know ferns have existed on Earth for millions of years, but just how closely do ancient ferns resemble modern ones?
At the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois, USA, approximately 306-million-year-old carbonate concretions have preserved hundreds of thousands of fossils, including rare soft tissues.
Join Madison Tripp, a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Swedish Natural History Museum and WA Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin University, as she shares her research on biomarkers in fossils from Mazon Creek. By examining molecular fossils preserved alongside soft tissue fossils and coprolites (fossilised faeces), her work has revealed that Carboniferous ferns share many biochemical similarities with modern ferns.
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Episode transcript
[Recording] You’re listening to the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip Talks Archive. The WA Museum Boola Bardip hosts a series of thought-provoking talks and conversations tackling big issues, questions and ideas. The Talks Archive is recorded on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodja. The Western Australian Museum acknowledges and respects the traditional owners of their ancestral lands, waters and skies.
Facilitator: Thank you for being here. For this month’s Meet the Museum, we’re delighted to welcome Madison Tripp from Curtin University, and we’ve got a little bit of a bio here about Madison. Madison is a Postdoctoral Researcher, which I think many of you would know already, but working with the Swedish Natural History Museum and the WA Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre at Curtin Uni. Her talk tonight will cover some of her research findings into her work with exceptionally well-preserved fossils that reveal insights into ancient organisms and ecosystems. Got that right?
Madison Tripp: Yeah, perfect.
Facilitator: Good. Right person. It’s an absolute delight to have you here tonight, Madison. Thank you for taking the time to do this, and over to you and we’ll take questions at the end, yeah? Is that okay?
MT: Yep.
Facilitator: Over to you. Would you please welcome Madison. [Audience applause]
MT: Thank you so much to Arlene and the WA Museum for having me. It’s really exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking to give a talk here, so I hope that it’s interesting and I hope you all learn something. So, yeah, I’m a post-doc at the Swedish Natural History Museum and an adjunct research fellow at the WA-OIGC at Curtin University which is where I did my PhD, which I finished about a year and a half ago now. So most of the work that I’m going to talk to you about today is, or all the work I’m going to talk about today, is from my PhD. So I did my PhD under the supervision of Kliti Grice and William Rickard who are on my collaborations list here, and my current supervisor is Vivi Vajda with the Swedish Natural History Museum.
So I’ll start off with some acknowledgements. So I also just wanted to briefly acknowledge the Whadjuk people of the Noongar nation and pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. All this work was done under a Curtin PhD scholarship with the Australian Government and various funding schemes that have allowed me to do this work and present it to you today. And also just upfront wanted to acknowledge the team at the WA-OIGC who help with everything that I do and I’m really grateful for them, and our technical support and all the different facilities at Curtin.
So, I’m a chemist by training. I’ve learnt a little bit of geology and palaeontology on the way, and when I say a little bit, I mean, like, a little bit. I really like what we do, we do chemistry and we’re able to apply that to geological settings and palaeontology to answer really interesting questions about our planet and its past and evolution. The fossil record is important because it’s our most useful tool for understanding the history of life on Earth. Fossils are most commonly found as hard, persistent materials like bones or imprints in rocks. So when you think of a fossil, you’re probably thinking of like a, you know, a T-Rex or something really big with a big skull, a big skeleton or something like that. So, events as recorded by fossils are used to subdivide geological time. So this is a really important field of research.
So one of the less common, but equally significant types of fossils include soft tissues. And so this might include like skin or guts of animals or actual intact plant tissues rather than just impressions. And these are important because they represent a gap in our understanding of the fossil record typically, so they’re much less common, and so there’s a lot of information missing based on that bias in the preservation record. So that’s what we’re interested in studying. So this kind of gap that we have with soft tissue fossils is a product of the ability of these fossils to persist in the environment. So we want to understand, like, how are fossils preserved and how specifically how are exceptional fossils preserved. So there are a few different modes of preservation that we want to understand first. So, normal preservation, up on the top left, is what I kind of just described to you. [shows presentation slides] When you have, like, a bone, those bones are…so say, like, an animal is deceased and is kind of deposited into the environment. Tissue usually begins to decay very quickly, as we all know, and it’s really disgusting, and it’s broken down by a range of organisms, or microorganisms, sorry. And this leaves the bone, which takes a lot longer to break down, and it gives it more time to be replaced by minerals. And so this is, then they’re able to be deposited and, like, kind of sedimented under the rock and able to be preserved for long periods of time.
Selective preservation is kind of like a step between this and exceptional preservation, which is where the chemical composition of the organism plays a role in its preservation. So, things like, if you take like a plant, for an example, plants have chemicals in their leaves that make them, you know, thick and waxy, and it helps give them structure and those chemicals we call biopolymers are also then able to be preserved more easily because they are harder to break down. So if the conditions are kind of a little bit better and those chemicals are present, often the fossils we see are a product of that sort of selective preservation.
And then exceptional preservation is the rarest mode of preservation that we tend to see. And so that’s why we call it, you know, ‘exceptional’, and so this includes soft tissues and requires really unique conditions. So, for example, if something like a plant or an animal is really rapidly deposited and that pore space is really rapidly decreased, then that inhibits the degradation long enough for them to be replaced by minerals and, therefore, are able to persist. So this sort of tends to happen in isolated sites with really large volumes rather than happening kind of in like, you know, sporadically through the fossil record. You tend to see this in large sites.
So one of these is the kind of focus of my PhD, which is Mazon Creek. So Mazon Creek, was a – is a site, currently it’s slightly south of Chicago in the United States. It was and…but the fossil preservation occurred during the Carboniferous. So all the animals and plants that we see there were from the Carboniferous, which was a period 300 million years ago. And at the time it was…so currently now it’s like in the middle of a bunch of land underneath Chicago, and at the time it was on the equator. So this is kind of what it might’ve looked like. [shows presentation slides] It was really swampy. Yeah, it was really swampy, really humid, lots of plant material is known for overlying the coal seams, there was lots of organic material being deposited. Lots of things like big trees, big bugs, which is pretty much my worst nightmare. And you can see those on the right there. [shows presentation slides] This is an example of the sort of preservation we see.
So all the fossils are preserved in these iron carbonate concretions. So these are essentially – and I’ve got some up front if you want to have a look at the end as well – like concretion. I don’t know if you can picture it when I say that, but it’s like a round nodule and it forms around the fossils and it’s made of this like really tough iron carbonate cement. And that’s what is attributed to the preservation, is this really rapid encasement in iron carbonate, which I’ll get on to a little more in a moment.
So, there’s a lot of…the Mazon Creek is host to a really large number of specimens, a lot of weird stuff. So this one at the bottom is what is called the Tully Monster. [shows presentation slides] I’m not sure if anyone’s ever heard of it, but it’s really weird looking. So, just briefly, it’s one of the kind of the more broadly talked about species from the Mazon Creek and entirely lacks hard parts. So it’s only a soft tissue fossil, other than, I think, a recent paper which determine that it has cartilage in this thing which is called its eye bar. And so that’s its eyes. And then it’s got this like grabby thing and… [audience member interjects] That’s not its mouth apparently, that’s what they think. So, for this reason, it’s really largely defied phylogenetic classification, and I don’t really know what it’s related to, and it’s a point of a lot of ongoing discussion in the Mazon Creek scientific community.
So a little more about it. So, a lot of the concretions are found in this member called the Francis Crick Shale and this overlies a coal bed so a lot of the concretions were found because they were, you know, trying to get the coal and had to kind of go through this layer of fossils. And so there’s been identified there’s about hundreds of thousands of concretions from the Mazon Creek, and most of them have fossils in them, and they’ve identified over 350 plant species and over 465 animal species at this location alone. And, like I said, this is attributed to the fact that they’re in these concretions and they had to have formed really, really quickly to be able to preserve these soft tissues, right. And there’s got to be some sort of relationship between the tissue organism itself and the concretion because the shape and size of them, as you can see, quite clearly often follows the actual shape and size of the organism. So we can kind of infer that there’s some sort of relationship between the deposition of an animal and the growth of a concretion, which is also then preserving it. So it’s a little bit of an interesting question.
So we wanted to kind of understand well, okay, how concretions form. There’s already a little bit known about this. So if something like a leaf is deposited, is then buried and very rapidly minerals precipitate, and this creates decreased porosity, like I said. So this is like the space that organic molecules can move through or fluids can move in, and so that process then means that very early oxygen is utilised and it’s gone. Basically, there’s no oxygen in these areas anymore. And that’s a really important factor in very rapid tissue decay. And then you get to the replacement. Basically, that slows down the decomposition so that the tissue can be replaced by minerals. And this is all kind of the product of, as the tissue breaks down, the fatty acids that make up the tissues are also broken down into smaller components and able to react and form a mineral. And that happens outwards from the concretion. So it has to be like this really quick process that happens. The tissue has to decay first, but then this process has to then come in quickly enough to lock the fossil in place. So it’s kind of like these competing processes that somehow happen perfectly in time with each other so the preservation can occur. And so, we’re interested in this because obviously, firstly, it preserves fossils and then it also preserves molecules. So, like I said, I’m a chemist, so this is where I get interested. So we refer to this as biomarkers. So biomarkers are basically molecular fossils of biological lipids. So they retain the characteristic chemical structure and this can be used for the identification of source organisms. So, for example, I’ve got a bunch of structures here. [shows presentation slides] You don’t have to really worry about them. Just look at the numbers I’ve put next to them. So each of these structures is really, really similar, but they have a different number of carbons. So each of these lines represents a carbon to carbon. And the length of that chain is what I’ve described to you. So that is retained. So much like a morphological fossil, a molecule will undergo some degradation. And sterols are a really good example because they have similar structures but different chain links are characteristic of different organisms.
So now I can put these into their kind of groups. So cholestane is from cholesterol, which we all know because we all have it and we probably all hear about it a lot. And that is produced by all animals, so it exists in the cell wall for structure and rigidity and a bunch of other things that I’m not quite sure I’m the expert to talk about. Plants comparatively produce more or less the same compounds, but with 29 carbons in a structure. And same with fungal, like a fungi will produce 28 of these. And then we have a few other different groups of compounds.
Like I said, we can compare this to like the breakdown of a fossil, right? So if we have our biomolecule, which here is cholesterol, this then undergoes a bunch of complex chemical rearrangements that I don’t even want you to really look at, just know that they’re there, and it transforms into a more stable biomarker. [shows presentation slides] So, as you can see, these retain that structure but what’s lost is these functional groups, and these are very reactive. So, kind of like a tissue, they’re reactive to their environment and they’re easily broken down. But then what we’re left with is a nice structure that we can then relate back to, okay, well we’ve got, you know, cholestane from cholesterol so it has to come from an animal, right? So those are the kind of tools that we’re using to investigate the molecular fossil record. So the first part, which is the part that I think was in the synopsis for this talk of my PhD, was looking at some of the many plant species that are preserved at Mazon Creek. So, like I said, there are over 350 species preserved. I’m one person with three years, so I did three species. [MT laughs] And I wanted to compare these to see what we could learn about the lipid composition of a few different species of plants from the Mazon Creek. So these are the examples of a few I chose. So I did some repeats of each of these so that we could compare and get some interesting information out hopefully.
So, firstly, true ferns are basically what you see, a fern, if you have a fern in your bathroom or something, that is a true fern. And they, if you ever have a look underneath them, they have these really odd looking spores and that’s how they reproduce, and that’s what characterises them as a fern. And in the Carboniferous, these were like really, really big tree ferns. And then we also have seed ferns. These are called ferns, but they’re quite different and they’re actually completely extinct. They went extinct, not geologically, not too long after the Carboniferous. And they’re considered to be more closely related to modern, like, flowering plants or something like that, but that relationship is still quite highly debated. And then we also compare this with articulates, so they’re like modern horsetails, and in the Carboniferous they were more like climbing vine plants and things like that. So a little bit different again.
So this is an example of a few of the concretions. [shows presentation slides] So, like I said, each sample consisted of a number of species and the results that I’m about to show you were pretty consistent. So to go through how we do what we do: this is our fern in our concretion that we’ve started with. So what I do with that first is cut it up physically with a really sharp blade into a few sections. So what I want to do here is I want to get, separate my fossil from its surrounding matrix, because then I can actually, if I see anything important, I know it’s from my fossil and not from the rock around it or someone touching it or something like that. So that’s kind of like my important control to also then understand what’s going on in the surrounding rock.
So we take our three sections and we extract them. So extracting is basically using an organic solvent – and we want organic because we want organic molecules – and so like dissolves like and we want to extract our organic molecules from our solid into our solvent. So that’s what you’re seeing here. [shows presentation slides] This is basically the flasks down the bottom holding our solvent and we’ve got our crushed up rock material up in the section above it, and then as it, the solvent, kind of infiltrates that sediment, it then extracts the molecules and then we can analyse them. So we’re left with this extract, which we call bitumen, and we do a chemical separation to separate them into stuff that we can look at more easily and then we analyse them.
And so this is just an example of one of our instruments that we would use: gas chromatography with a mass spectrometer on it. [shows presentation slides] Don’t worry about the lingo, it’s not important. [MT laughs] Sorry, Sophie. And then what we get is something like this. So we get, this is called a spectra, and each of these spikes down the bottom here is characteristic of an individual compounds. So then we’re able to identify our compounds like so. Just as an idea that’s kind of the amount of process that we’re going through. So then we look at our data from our fossil. So, like I said, we want to compare our different regions. So we have our outer matrix and our inner matrix, as I called them – very exciting naming – and we’ve got our fossil. And so straight away you can see that there’s a nice difference in our spectra, right? And this was very exciting. This was a very exciting day for me. I was right near the end of my PhD, and I was really stressing about my last chapter. and I came in and I got this and I was like, I think I cried a little bit, which is a bit embarrassing. [MT laughs] So, we can look at this and compare it to our matrix, and we want to understand what these compounds are and what they tell us about our fossil.
So at the front here, we have in these, in our inner and outer matrix, these are the most abundant compounds. These are what we call polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. And these can be from a range of sources like different, like coming from different plants or combustion of plants or combustion of other materials. And so we can identify what those are and then we want to know what these are, right? So when we have a look at this closeup, the ones highlighted were ones I was actually able to identify, and there’s a lot of other stuff in here that I’m not quite sure what it is. And again, don’t worry about the compounds. This is kind of what the analysis of the data looks like. [shows presentation slides]
And so I’m able to go, okay – what I would like you to take away is that they all look the same, right? They all look very similar. They all have five rings and they all have a similar amount of carbon bonds on them. And this is important because…so this is kind of a group of all the compounds we’re able to extract from these true ferns. And you might remember me saying we have, for example, these sorts of compounds, they’re called hopanes. Hopanes are produced by bacterial sources but in that case they have 35 carbons. So you can see the difference is they have that long chain up on the end. Plants produce the same compounds but with only 30 carbons. So that’s our skeleton that we’re able to trace back to our source. And, importantly, these C30 compounds are known to be extracted from modern ferns, so it’s an example of some studies where they’ve looked at living ferns and have been able to extract the same compounds or the same precursors to these compounds. And so that was really exciting data to receive.
So then, like I said, we want to compare to other species, right? And so this is just looking at the fossil of the other species of plants that we looked at, and what you can see is that in the seed fern – the articulate – we don’t really have anything that looks the same. They look actually kind of like our matrix, which is also a little bit of a bummer, but the data is what the data is. And so what this tells us, however, is that, chemically very similar to living modern ferns. Remember, these are 300 million years ago, like a really painfully long time, and they’re different to other extinct plants. So this could be a product of how compounds are preserved. Specific compounds are more favourable to preservation, but it tells us they’re chemically different either way, right? If they’d undergone the same method of preservation, you’d kind of expect them to be similar if they had similar composition. So this is just if you’re interested, this was published last year, in Scientific Reports, so if you want to have a look more at the chemistry, that’s the publication for it. Sorry, I need some water. [MT pauses for water]
Does anyone who’s not my family know what this is? [MT laughs and shows fossil] I said, not my family because you’ve seen this. So this, these are two examples of coprolites. Does anyone know what coprolites are? Poo, that’s right! So these are fossilised faecal material, is the polite presenter way that I’m going to say it, and so fossilised coprolites are interesting because they tell us about what an animal was eating. So usually if an animal, like, if bones are preserved – I mean, palaeontologists, quite frankly, are wizards, and like, they figure out what stuff was eaten based on, you know, stuff I can’t even imagine. But this gives us a really unique insight into exactly what they’re eating because it’s preserved intact, you know, as the digested remains.
So the ones, the coprolites can have a lot of shape and structure that can tell you about where they’re from. So the example I can think of off the top of my head is like a shark coprolite often has like a spiral kind of shape to it, and so that would identify which animal exactly that came from. The ones we got a quite, you know, indistinct. They don’t have much shape to them. They’re kind of like blobs, which is probably why we got them for the analysis that we’re doing. But this gives us an opportunity to test our biomarker methods and see, okay, can we figure out what these were eating based on the lipids that are preserved within them?
And this sort of work is kind of often done in archaeological studies. So more recent material to figure out what, like, ancient civilizations were eating and what their lives look like. But this study represents the oldest that we’ve ever looked at, preserved faecal material using these sorts of methods. So again, we’ve separated them. The white lines represent where we’ve separated them into their fossil and matrix. [shows presentation slides] And we’re going to compare again the concretion down the bottom here with the fossil itself. And again, you can imagine, I was very excited because they’re very different. And so what we’re looking at is the steroids. So we can go through again and identify each of these compounds using our, you know, analysis methods. And we can class them into different groups of steroids.
So, hopefully, you remember we have our different sources of steroids. So we know there are C27s from our animals, our 28s from our fungi and our 29s are from our plants. So what you notice about the fossil is that it’s very red. And so that means all of these peaks here are different structures of this cholestane from cholesterol. And so this tells us there’s a lot of animal input and, notably, there’s also pretty negligible green up there, which means there’s very little plant input. Comparatively, our matrix looks like what we’d call a mixed environmental signal. We’ve got a bit of animal, we’ve got a bit of fungi, we’ve got a bit of plant, and that’s kind of what we’d expect because, as we know, it was a very diverse environment where the concretions were formed.
So we’ve got our fossil with our cholestane from our animal source and we’ve got very little plant input. So what this tells us is that probably this was a carnivore, or at least very leaning very heavily towards an animal-based diet, and then we can also validate this data with other methods that we’ve combined here. So, for example, this is…just a plot, don’t worry about it. [shows presentation slides] It was done using a technique called Raman spectroscopy, and that is basically a surface analysis technique where you get the characteristic spectra of a region of interest. And so what, this is the work of my co-author Jasmina Wiemann on this paper, and she does this with a range of different fossils and characterises their organic signatures of the tissues and then statistically compares them. So this is a statistic plot that shows where the organic signatures plot of different types of fossils, basically.
So you can see in yellow here we’ve got different types of animals. And at the bottom we’ve got some plants. And straight away, I mean, they’re quite separate, right, which is nice in, you know, the world of statistics. And so she was able to separate these into, okay, this is mostly carnivory versus herbivory. So our animal versus our plant-based diet. And then she examined these coprolites that we gave her, and these plot in here in the yellow, which is really nice, and she also found that they contain some bits of invertebrate cuticle and some shell fragments. So that supports that it had a diet of lots of, like, shelly kind of animals. Interestingly, the aforementioned Tully Monster was like up there somewhere. So we like to joke that maybe it was eating the Tully Monster. That would be a really awesome paper, if we could prove it. [MT laughs] So again, this is the publication for this, if anyone’s interested in the rest of the data. [shows presentation slides] That was a couple of years ago now.
So, from here, what we wanted to do was try to spatially resolve these organics, by which I mean, like where in the fossil are they preserved and therefore how are they preserved? So, to do this, we used a really, really swanky technique called time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry. ToF-SIMS is what I’m going to call it, because that’s a mouthful. This is the instrument. [shows presentation slides] It was installed about halfway through my PhD during the middle of Covid, which was an absolute nightmare as you can imagine, but it’s like a fantastic instrument.
What it does basically is bombards the surface and creates ions, a signal basically that we can detect. The most important part of this is it does it on the surface and it’s non-destructive. And it also then can spatially figure out, okay, where is each signal coming from. So we can figure out where our minerals are in our sample and also then where our molecules are of our organics. So we combine this with our bulk geochemical extractions, which is the data I’ve just showed you. So we’ve got our coprolite. Again, we’re working on the same sample because it has a really nice distinct fossil signature. So this was a nice starting point. So, okay, we’ve got something that we know what we’re looking for and we can target it using this new technique that we’re trying to figure out a little bit and then try to map it.
So we take a section through this. So this is a three-dimensional fossil and we take a section – see this is, like, optically you can see through it – section, that’s how thin it is, so that we can map – it’s very flat. So, with ToF-SIMS, you can do it on, like, an intact sample. It’s limited by the, you know, the shape and size of the sample and also the topography. So, if it’s like really bumpy, it’s going to affect your signal. So we wanted to try with a thin section where it’s very flat, and so you can actually figure out where your highest signal is coming from. That’s a really important component. So we’ve had a look, see, this is an example of a close up region that we’re looking at. And, firstly, we can map the minerals. So this has, this fossil region has two main mineral phases. So these are what’s called fluorapatite or a calcium phosphate. And our iron carbonate. So that’s our concretion-forming mineral that we’ve been talking about. And a little bit of iron sulphide as well. [MT coughs] Sorry, pardon me.
So we’ve got our two mineral regions. A couple of things you want to think about when we’re going through this: Phosphate minerals are what are known for three-dimensional preservation. So if you know of the WA Gogo formation, that’s all phosphate. Those beautiful three-dimensional fish. It’s known for preserving things like skin, like muscles, like cellular details. It’s kind of known as the, you know, the absolute top form of soft tissue preservation that occurs very rapidly after deposition. And then we have our iron carbonate. So we know this is forming the concretion. What we’re seeing here is, in a fossil, there’s little bits of it spread throughout as well.
So we want to, we’ve got our cholestane again. And so we know this is our most abundant molecule, so we want to map this. So we’ve looked for that in our sample. And so this is a map of those ions. [shows presentation slides] So, I should say, the yellow regions are the most abundant and the dark is where it’s absent. So what you’re looking at is basically just an abundance map, so how much of this is in this region.
So what we can see with our organics – so we’re looking at our biomarker – this is firstly heterogeneous, so it’s different across the surface. It’s not just the same everywhere. And that’s really good because firstly that means it’s probably not just some sort of muck on the surface of our sample, right? And it’s following the shape of some of our minerals. So now on the right I’ve compared, I’ve got this map of our organics in with these maps on the left of our minerals. And what we can see is we look at the phosphate in blue is our organics and that’s quite closely filling in the space between our phosphate. And, comparatively, it follows almost exactly the shape of some of our iron carbonate. So that means that those two are co-occurring. So our organics are associated with our siderite, our iron carbonates, I should say. And this is interesting because, like I said, phosphate is considered the most favourable mineral for three-dimensional tissue preservation, of a soft tissue preservation. But our molecules aren’t preserved there. Our molecules are preserved with our cement.
So this tells us a little bit about how this is formed, how these concretions are formed, how molecules are preserved. So we can think about the process of what’s happening in this. So at the top we have our coprolite – well, at the time it was just poo – and that’s been deposited, and this all happens very quickly. So the phosphate is formed and replacing that very quickly. The reason it does that is because tissues have a lot of calcium and phosphorus in them, and they provide those materials that then are forming these minerals and then kind of as soon as that’s happened, our iron carbonate cement is forming. So that’s happening. So you can see our green represents our organic matter, and that’s moving, that’s moving away from the tissue. [shows presentation slides] So in here we’ve got just like a little look at what’s inside. So these are, you’ve got your gaps and you can see they’re being filled by siderite, or iron carbonate. And as that happens the molecules are probably, like, locked in with that. It’s a very fine, textured cement. And so, therefore, that’s probably why they are preserved with this iron carbonate instead of with the phosphate. So I had text to go with that. [shows presentation slides] Anyway.
So our degradation of organic matter breaks down to acids and those are what is, requires very niche kind of Ph conditions and that’s creating the correct Ph, so acidity, for this to happen. And yeah. And so then we get our cementation. Obviously we’re having it interstitially within the phosphate and then we’re also having it occur outside the edge and outwards like we said with our concretions.
So. I hope you find this research as exciting as I do. It gives us some new insights into living and extinct organisms and the relationship between them. It gives us a really unique way of looking at the fossil record biomarkers. So, you know, this is interesting not only in the aspect that we’re able to look at a fossil and figure out what its molecular composition was, but, you know, the whole field of research looks at these molecular fossils in the absence of fossils. So we’re able to then use this information to inform that research. And then next time we look at, you know, a section through the rock, we’re able to compare, take this data into account and figure out maybe a new source of organic matter or something like that. Novel dietary information, carnivores versus herbivores, that’s pretty nice. And there’s some ongoing research in the group that is looking at different specimens of those and taking this data and then going forward with that and looking at herbivores and things like that.
And this gives us a lot of kind of insight into where to look for fossil preservation, but also where to look for molecular preservation. So we know this, what this suggests to us is that maybe where your three-dimensional fossils are is not necessarily the best for your molecular preservation, but we want these sorts of sites where we have this cement, this really persistent kind of mineral formation, that’s going to allow us to look for molecules. And looking at really nice new technology like ToF-SIMS gives us really new perspectives on fossil preservation. It’s a really unique way of studying this field.
[Audience applause]
[Recording] Thanks for listening to the Talks Archive brought to you by the Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip. To listen to other episodes, go to visit.museum.wa.gov.au/episodes/conversation where you can hear a range of talks and conversations. The Talks Archive is recorded on Whadjuk Nyoongar Boodjar. The Western Australian Museum acknowledges and respects the traditional owners of their ancestral lands, waters and skies.
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Curious about the creators behind our Megalodon head in the Wild Life gallery? Join the makers from CDM: Studio and peek behind the scenes as they share their process of designing, building and delivering museum exhibits.
Discover what we can observe about the Moon, learn about our current knowledge, and understand the importance of returning to its surface!
Discover the elusive Night Parrot at WA Museum Boola Bardip! Join us for an exclusive panel discussion with experts Penny Olsen, Allan Burbidge and Rob Davis.
Dr Parwinder Kaur, Director, DNA Zoo, shared her career journey as the featured guest in the fourth instalment of the My Australia Story conversation series.
Join Museum experts Jake Newman-Martin and Linette Umbrello as they take us on a mammalian adventure of the minute kind, from tiny marsupials to giant megafauna.
Discover the remarkable story of Wayne Bergmann, a Nyikina man and Kimberley leader who has dedicated his life to his community, in this moving memoir of living between two cultures.
Celebrate Perth Design Week with a robust panel discussion focusing on design and business.
Talk series hosted by Geoff Hutchison that explores who our young selves were and what became of them. This week hear from Sabrina Hahn.
Career Journeys of First Generation Australians - Meet James Jegasothy, Executive Director, Office of Multicultural Interests
How much will we look to the language of activism in finding the way towards reconciliation in Australia?
Navigating the delicate balance between the preservation of the Conservation Estate and our cherished and loyal feline companions is both a challenge and a responsibility.