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A publ icat ion of the Rochester Academy of Science FOSSIL SECTION

The FOSSILETTER

VOL. 34 Number 1 September 2016

June Picnic Meeting We had excellent evening weather for our

annual picnic on June 7th, following one of our few rainy days. We met at the Circle Shelter at Ellison Park and this must have been a good choice as over two members attended which was our largest June meeting attendance in several years. Several helped Dan with grilling and there was a wide variety of appetizers, salads, side dishes, and desserts brought by members. Lively conversation was everywhere, and we got to watch a Frisbee team practicing on the field next to us. The attending member consensus was to rent a park facility again next year, so we will.

No September Meeting We do not meet in September due to the

Labor Day Holiday, nor in January due to the New Year's Day Holiday. Our meeting dates for the rest of 2016 are Tuesdays 10/4, 11/1, and 12/6. The Spring 2017 meeting dates are Tuesdays 2/7, 3/7, 4/4, Friday 5/12, and Tuesday 6/6.

October Meeting 7:30 PM at the Brighton Town Hall. SUNY

Brockport Professor Judy Massare, Mesozoic marine reptile specialist, will speak on working with historic collections and the problem of composite specimens. "Recognizing composite specimens in historic collections and the return of Protoichthyosaurus".

There will be more details in the next newsletter.

President's Report by Dan Krisher No meetings of the Fossil Section were held

after our picnic in early June but our fieldtrip and outreach schedule was active. On 6/25 the

Section had a field trip to Little Beard's Creek near Geneseo. The creek was dry but collecting on the talus slopes was very productive. On 6/26 the Section participated in an outreach event at Burrough's Audubon in Pittsford. This was a first time event for us and we had a small but steady crowd for the 2 hour duration. On 7/9 the Section had a joint field trip with the Wayne County Gem and Mineral Club to the Rickard Hill site near Schoharie. There was a fair amount of rain but we managed to collect productively during a 3 hour dry window. From 7/29 to 7/31 members of the Section attended the annual symposium at the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca. On 8/7 the Section had a joint field trip to Green's Landing with WCGMC.

Fossil News Dr. Charles Mitchell of the State University of

NY at Buffalo has released a paleoenvironmental study on the Late Ordovician extinction. Chuck Mitchell has been a speaker for us on grapto-lites—his particular area of specialization. This new report is from ScienceDaily, 19 July 2016.

. The study of nearly www.sciencedaily.com22,000 fossils finds that ancient plankton communities began changing in important ways as much as 400,000 years before massive die-offs ensued during the first of Earth's five great extinctions. The study was a partnership between Canisius, SUNY Buffalo, St. Francis Xavier University, Dalhousie University and The Czech Academy of Sciences.

The research, published July 18 in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Aca-

demy of Sciences, focused on large zooplankton called graptolites. It suggests that the effects of environmental degradation can be subtle until they reach a tipping point, at which dramatic

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declines in population begin. "In looking at these organisms, what we saw

was a disruption of community structures -- the way in which the plankton were organized in the water column. Communities came to be less complex and dominated by fewer species well before the massive extinction itself," says co-author H. David Sheets, PhD, professor of physics at Canisius College and associate research prof-essor in the Evolution, Ecology and Behavior graduate program at the University at Buffalo.

Metabolograptus extraordinarius, a shallow-water

graptolite species,on a slab of rock from a study site

in Nevada harbors many specimens of which

together with some close relatives replaced all the

formerly dominant species following the end-

Ordovician mass extinction.

This turmoil during a time of ancient climate change, could hold lessons for the modern world, says co-author Charles E. Mitchell, PhD, professor of geology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. The shifts took place at the end of the Ordovician Period some 450 million years ago as the planet transitioned from a warm era into a cooler one, leading eventually to glaciation and lower sea levels.

"Our research suggests that ecosystems often respond in stepwise and mostly predictable ways to changes in the physical environment -- until they can't. Then we see much larger, more abrupt, and ecologically disruptive changes," Mitchell says. "The nature of such tipping point effects are hard to foresee and, at least in this case, they led to large and permanent changes in the composition of the oceans' living commun-ities.

"I think we need to be quite concerned about

where our current ocean communities may be headed or we may find ourselves at the tail end of a similar event -- a sixth mass extinction, living in a very different world than we would like."

In considering mass extinction, there is per-haps the temptation to think of such events as rapid and sudden: At one moment in history, various species are present, and the next they are not. This might be the conclusion you'd draw if you examined only whether different species of graptolites were present in the fossil record in the years immediately preceding and following the Ordovician extinction.

"If you just looked at whether they were present -- if they were there or not -- they were there right up to the brink of the extinction," Sheets says. "But in reality, these communities had begun declining quite a while before species started going extinct." The research teased out these details by using 21,946 fossil specimens from areas of Nevada in the U.S. and the Yukon in Canada that were once ancient sea beds to paint a picture of graptolite evolution.

The analysis found that as ocean circulation patterns began to shift hundreds of thousands of years before the Ordovician extinction, graptolite communities that previously included a rich array of both shallow- and deep-sea species began to lose their diversity and complexity. Deep-water graptolites became progressively rarer in comparison to their shallow-water counterparts, which came to dominate the ocean.

"There was less variety of organisms, and the rare organisms got rarer," Sheets says. "In the aftermath of a forest fire in the modern world, you might find that there are fewer organisms left -- that the ecosystem just doesn't have the same structure and richness as before. That's the same pattern we see here."

The dwindling deep-sea graptolites were species that specialized in obtaining nutrients from low-oxygen zones of the ocean. A decrease in the availability of such habitats may have sparked the creatures' decline, Sheets and Mitchell say. "Temperature changes drive deep ocean circulations, and we think the deep-water graptolites lost their habitats as the climate changed," Sheets says. "As the nature of the

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oceans shifted, their way of life went away."

The citation for this paper is: H. David Sheets,

Charles E. Mitchell, Michael J. Melchin, Jason

Loxton, Petr Štorch, Kristi L. Carlucci, Andrew D.

Hawkins. Graptolite community responses to

global climate change and the Late Ordovician

mass extinction. Proceedings of the National

Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201602102

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1602102113

RAS Fall Scientific Paper Session Don't forget to save the date of November 12,

2016 from 8:30AM to 2PM to attend the 43rd Annual Rochester Academy of Science Fall Scientific Papers Session. This will be held at Roberts Wesleyan College.

National Fossil Day We celebrate the seventh annual National

Fossil Day on October 12, 2016.

The 2016 artwork features three iconic Pleistocene ("ice age") animals from the United States—saber-toothed cat, long-horned bison, and a condor flying above. The landscape is an idealized representation of southern Nevada within what is now Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument.

Each month, a different Pleistocene ecosystem and the associated animals and plants will be featured on the National Fossil Day website. http://nature.nps.gov/geology/nationalfossilday/

Member News Recognition for members continues to come

in. Recently, member Dr.Judy Massare, our October speaker and SUNY Brockport specialist in Mesozoic marine reptiles, had a new species named in her honor by one of her peers.

Dean R. Lomax. A new leptonectid ichthyo-

saur from the Lower Jurassic (Hettangian) of

Nottinghamshire, England, UK, and the taxono-

mic usefulness of the ichthyosaurian coracoid.

Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 2016; 1

DOI:10.1080/14772019.2016.1183149

Following article from: ww.sciencedaily.com/

releases/2016/06/160614084208.htm. A new type of ichthyosaur, an extinct marine

reptile alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, has been identified by a Manchester palaeontol-ogist from a fossil found in an old quarry in Nottinghamshire.

Similar-shaped to dolphins and sharks, ichthyosaurs -- often misidentified as 'swimming dinosaurs' -- swam the seas of Earth for millions of years during the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretace-ous periods. The Nottinghamshire fossil is from the earliest part of the Jurassic Period -- 200 million years ago -- and only a handful of ichthyo-saur species are known from this period, making the discovery very significant. It is also the first time a species of this geological age has been found outside of Dorset and Somerset.

Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at The Univ-ersity of Manchester, examined the specimen after seeing it on a visit to Leicester's New Walk Museum, which acquired the fossil in 1951, and spotted some unusual features. The specimen is

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relatively complete, consisting of a partial skele-ton including a skull, pectoral bones, limbs, pelvis bones, ribs and vertebrae. However, the bones are disorderly -- it appears that the carcass 'nosedived' into the seabed before it became fossilised, which may have restricted previous study.

"When I first saw this specimen, I knew it was unusual," said Dean. "It displays features in the bones -- especially in the coracoid (part of the pectoral girdle) -- that I had not seen before in Jurassic ichthyosaurs anywhere in the world. The specimen had never been published, so this rather unusual individual had been awaiting detailed examination."

Dr. Mark Evans, Palaeontologist and Curator of Natural Sciences at New Walk Museum, said: "Parts of the skeleton had previously been on long-term loan to ichthyosaur specialist and former museum curator Dr. Robert Appleby, and had only returned to the museum in 2004 after he sadly passed away. He was clearly intrigued by the specimen, and although he worked on it for many years, he had identified it as a previously known species but never published his findings."

Dean has named the new species Wahlisaurus

massarae in honor of two palaeontologists (Professor Judy Massare and Bill Wahl) who have contributed significantly to the study of ichthyo-saurs, and who first introduced Dean to studying them.

"Both Judy and Bill have been tremendous mentors for me. They have significantly contributed to palaeontology, especially the study of ichthyosaurs, and I cannot think of a better way to remember them by naming this new ichthyosaur in their honour. Their names will be set in stone forever, pun intended!"

The specimen is the first new genus of ichthy-osaur from the British Early Jurassic to be describ-ed since 1986. Thousands of specimens from this time are known, and many of these have been examined -- and continue to be re-examined in light of new knowledge and technologies. However, as the specimen is from a practically unknown location for the discovery of ichthyo-saurs, any new discovery could be of real scientific significance. This new species is also

important for our understanding of ichthyosaur species diversity, and their geographical distribution during the Early Jurassic.

Book Review We have something a bit different this time.

Instead of a book, we are reviewing the undergraduate college course A New History of

Life by award-winning teacher Professor Stuart Sutherland of The University of British Columbia.

Professor Stuart Sutherland

This is an 18 CD set of 36 half-hour college lectures, just the thing to listen to while driving around instead of pop hits or talk radio. This set is produced by The Teaching Company. I found this to be a very

good overview of the world of paleontology, covering the evolution of life from its beginnings to the present. No back-ground in paleontology is required, so it is an excellent introduction to concepts and time periods with which you may be unfamiliar.

The following is from the publisher's notes: The story of our world and the different living things that have populated it is an amazing epic with millions of familiar and strange species, exotic settings, planet-wide cataclysms, and

surprising twists. Periodic mass extinctions are inevitably followed by life rebounding in unexpected ways. We get the details of how paleontologists and geologists know what they do about the past, taking the most unassuming pieces of evidence—a fossil bone bit, a rock layer sequence, a geochemical test—and reading a rich narrative of past events. By drawing on tools from other disciplines, such as biology, meteor-

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ology, and astrophysics, Sutherland presents a multidisciplinary effort to understand Earth as a system composed of many interacting parts—Earth system science.

In the first 5 lectures, he introduces concepts such as the vastness of time, fossil clocks, paleontology detective tools, and plate tectonics. He then covers the origins of Earth and its various "spheres" (atmosphere, hydrosphere, etc) followed by the chemical basis of life. This provides the basis for the evolutionary history of life as he proceeds through time, step by step, from single celled organisms to the creatures of the early seas, to the conquest of the land, the age of dinosaurs, the age of mammals, and the

age of man. He covers pre-Cambrian snowball earth and mass extinctions, as well as Ediacaran life. The five great Paleozoic and Mesozoic mass extinction events are covered in detail, as are the interplay of geological and extra-terrestrial phenomena in life's transitions. The down side is that because this is an audio course he occasionally talks about material that you cannot see. The accompanying booklet includes some, but not all of the illustrations to which he refers, leaving you to look up specific items on Google when you get home.

This course is available to be borrowed, and I

will have it at the October meeting.

Earth during the Late Ordovician

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CALENDER OF EVENTS

October

Tuesday October 4, FOSSIL MEETING 7:30 PM Brighton Town Hall Downstairs Meeting Room 2300 Elmwood Ave. Speaker Dr. Judy Massare, "Recognizing composite specimens in historic collections and the return of Protoichthyosaurus". Visitors welcome. November

Tuesday November 1, FOSSIL MEETING 7:30 PM Brighton Town Hall Downstairs Meeting Room 2300 Elmwood Ave. Visitors welcome. Visitors are welcome to all Fossil Section meetings! Refreshments are served. For more information and the latest updates check the RAS Website (www.RASNY.org). You can also contact Dan Krisher at DLKFossil@gmail.com or John Handley at jhandley@rochester.rr.com for further information.

ROCHESTER ACADEMY OF SCIENCE FOSSIL SECTION Monthly meetings are held the first Tuesday of each month from October to December and from February to May at 7:30 pm at the Brighton Town Hall, Community Meeting Room, 2300 Elmwood Avenue, Rochester, NY unless otherwise listed. OFFICERS PHONE E-MAIL President: Dan Krisher 585-698-3147 DLKFossil@gmail.com Vice President/Program Chair: Open Secretary: Dan Krisher 585-698-3147 DLKFossil@gmail.com Treasurer: John Handley 585-802-8567 jhandley@rochester.rr.com Director (three-year-term): Open Director (two-year-term): Open Director (one-year-term): Michael Grenier 585-671-8738 mgrenier@frontiernet.net APPOINTED POSITIONS

Field Trip Coordinator: Dan Krisher 585-293-9033 DLKFossil@gmail.com FossiLetter Editor: Michael Grenier 585-671-8738 mgrenier@frontiernet.net --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The FossiLetter is published during each meeting month of the year. Please send submissions to Michael Grenier preferably via e-mail at mgrenier@frontiernet.net or by U.S. Postal Service mail to 692 Maple Drive, Webster, NY 14580 (585) 671-8738. Deadline date for submissions to the Fossiletter is the 15th of the month.

For scheduling changes and the latest

updates please check the RAS Website (www.rasny.org) and click on the Fossil Section link. Last minute updates can also be found on the General Announcements page of the Academy Website.