Guest student Wyatt Petryshen studies 3D morphometrics of conodonts
Wyatt Petryshen, Masters student from the University of Calgary, is visiting the Palaeobiology research group to conduct a project on 3D conodont morphometrics with Dr. Emilia Jarochowska and Dr. Kenneth De Baets.
Wyatt’s visit has been supported by a grant from the Hertha and Helmut Schmauser Foundation. He is scanning exceptional conodont material in our µCT lab and conducting 3D morphometric analyses.
“In a drastically changing world, understanding the ways in which organisms respond and change to environmental pressures will be critical in maintaining our ocean ecosystems. Conodonts provide us with an ideal system to study evolutionary change at a high temporal resolution through deep time. I am studying a group of cosmopolitan conodonts, Sweetognathids, that evolved parallel lineages across the globe during the Early Permian. My aim is to quantify the morphologic variation in this group of conodonts using 3-dimensional models recreated from CT-scans to inform us on how environment change may have driven morphology.”