Post by Joe Botting on Aug 9, 2006 16:49:04 GMT -5
Hi all,
Just a couple of days collecting for Lucy and I, but with the able and very welcome assistance of Ormrod, and two other enthusiass. We did a rarefaction curve to estimate diversity at the holothurian site, in the hope that sitting down and doing things properly might bring some more beasties to light. It did. Two more holothurians (one an isolated ring that could be very useful for workingout its structure),a dendroid or two, at least two types of bivalved arthropod carapace, some bits of a probable cornute, and of course some sponges. One in particular looks like it could be very interesting - it seems to be a leptomitid, a very widespread group in the Cambrian Burgess Shale-type faunas, but not known previously from anything younger.
Needless to say, I'll be doing more drawings (it's never-ending - I hope! ;D) and posting them (plus the odd photo when we can do them) on the site as and when. With any luck we can start submitting papers on this site in the not-horribly-distant future, but we still haven't got a really good sample for the sponges yet. I'm sure there's a lot more to come, although the diversity from this 20 cm bed is now around 50 species and climbing...
Joe
Just a couple of days collecting for Lucy and I, but with the able and very welcome assistance of Ormrod, and two other enthusiass. We did a rarefaction curve to estimate diversity at the holothurian site, in the hope that sitting down and doing things properly might bring some more beasties to light. It did. Two more holothurians (one an isolated ring that could be very useful for workingout its structure),a dendroid or two, at least two types of bivalved arthropod carapace, some bits of a probable cornute, and of course some sponges. One in particular looks like it could be very interesting - it seems to be a leptomitid, a very widespread group in the Cambrian Burgess Shale-type faunas, but not known previously from anything younger.
Needless to say, I'll be doing more drawings (it's never-ending - I hope! ;D) and posting them (plus the odd photo when we can do them) on the site as and when. With any luck we can start submitting papers on this site in the not-horribly-distant future, but we still haven't got a really good sample for the sponges yet. I'm sure there's a lot more to come, although the diversity from this 20 cm bed is now around 50 species and climbing...
Joe