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Exceptional Fossil Preservation in the Early Phanerozoic: Implications for Seawater Chemistry

Mon, March 9th, 2020
4:15 pm
- 5:15 pm

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The Geosciences Department and Class of 1960 Scholars Program presents Dr. Robert Gaines, Pomona College, speaking on “Exceptional Fossil Preservation in the Early Phanerozoic: Implications for Seawater Chemistry During the Flowering of Complex Life on Earth.”

In what has been hailed as the world’s most important fossil discovery in decades, Robert Gaines was a member of the team that discovered a stunning new Burgess Shale fossil site in Canada’s Kootenay National Park in 2014.  His recent research at Burgess Shale sites has also offered a likely solution to one of biology’s greatest riddles, the preservation of soft-tissue fossils from the Cambrian Explosion, the flowering of complex life on Earth during the Late Neoproterozoic and Cambrian Periods some 570 to 500 million years ago. His hypothesis, that a combination of calcium carbonate deposits and lower levels of oxygen and sulfur in the Cambrian seas prevented the degradation of the fossils by microbes, was validated by a startlingly consistent pattern in the geochemical data he collected from around the world.  He is also more broadly interested in microbial-mineral interactions as a link between the geosphere and the biosphere. He works on ancient sedimentary rocks in South China, British Columbia and the American Great Basin.

 

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