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Tag: Research

IMLS Inspire! Grant Award

collection of Löding beetles

Drs. John Abbott and Milt Ward were awarded an IMLS Inspire! grant for $47,575 to rehouse an historically and scientifically significant beetle collection. The proposed project will result in the rehousing of an historically and scientifically significant collection at the Alabama Museum of Natural History (ALMNH), bringing it up to modern collection standards. Additionally, the collection of beetles will be imaged and data digitized making it accessible to an international community. The Löding Beetle Collection consists of ~ 50,000 specimens […]

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Complete Ichthyornis skull illuminates mosaic assembly of the avian head

D.J. Field, M. Hanson, D. Burnham, L.E. Wilson, K. Super, D. Ehret, J. Ebersole & B.-A.S. Bhullar, published in Nature, volume 357, 3May2018. The skull of living birds is greatly modified from the condition found in their dinosaurian antecedents. Bird skulls have an enlarged, toothless premaxillary beak and an intricate kinetic system that includes a mobile palate and jaw suspensorium. The expanded avian neurocranium protects an enlarged brain and is flanked by reduced jaw adductor muscles. However, the order of […]

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A new species of Peritresius Leidy, 1856 (Testudines: Pan-Cheloniidae) from the Late Cretaceous (Campanian) of Alabama, USA, and the occurrence of the genus within the Mississippi Embayment of North America

A.D. Gentry, J.F. Parham, D.J. Ehret & J.A. Ebersole, published in PLOS ONE 13(4): e0195651 Late Cretaceous members of Peritresius belong to a diverse clade of marine adapted turtles currently thought to be some of the earliest representatives of the lineage leading to modern hard-shelled sea turtles (Pan-Cheloniidae). Prior studies have suggested that Peritresius was monospecific, with a distribution restricted to Maastrichtian deposits in North America. However, new Peritresius specimens identified from Alabama and Mississippi, USA, show that the genus […]

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A new cochliodont anterior tooth plate from the Mississippian of Alabama (USA) having implications for the origin of tooth plates from tooth files

W. Itano & L.L. Lambert, published in Zoological Letters 4(12) Paleozoic holocephalian tooth plates are rarely found articulated in their original positions. When they are found isolated, it is difficult to associate the small, anterior tooth plates with the larger, more posterior ones. Tooth plates are presumed to have evolved from fusion of tooth files. However, there is little fossil evidence for this hypothesis. We report a tooth plate having nearly perfect bilateral symmetry from the Mississippian (Chesterian Stage) Bangor […]

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A new species of Cretalamna sensu stricto (Lamniformes, Otodontidae) from the Late Cretaceous (Santonian-Campanian) of Alabama, USA

J.A. Ebersole & D.J. Ehret, published in PeerJ 6:e4229. Decades of collecting from exposures of the Upper Cretaceous Tombigbee Sand Member of the Eutaw Formation and Mooreville Chalk in Alabama, USA has produced large numbers of isolated Cretalamna (sensu stricto) teeth. Many of these teeth had formerly been assigned to the extinct Late Cretaceous shark Cretalamna appendiculata (Agassiz, 1843), a taxon that is now considered largely restricted to the Turonian of Europe. Recent studies have shed light on the diversity of Late Cretaceous Cretalamna (s.s.) taxa, […]

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