Revealing fossil anatomies and preservation pathways using advanced imaging techniques
The Early Ordovician (~480 million-year-old) Fezouata Shale Formation of Morocco is a critical source of evidence for the unfolding Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event, the largest radiation in animal diversity during the Paleozoic. The Fezouata Shale preserves abundant remains of ancient […]
The peopling of the Americas and the interaction of early humans with Pleistocene megafauna in South America remains highly debated. Recent discoveries suggest that human occupation of the Americas started around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), but the timing and […]
As of today I am starting a 2-year contract as Junior Lecturer (“Premier assistant”) in Palaeontology at the Institute of Earth Sciences of the University of Lausanne. I will be helping with the teaching of palaeontology, mostly practicals but will […]
Worms, arthropods, vertebrates: all terrestrial fauna has an aquatic origin. As far as vertebrates are concerned, including us humans, the water-to-land transition began about 400 million years ago. It is among the sarcopterygians (aquatic vertebrates with lobed fins, as opposed […]
The fur of various mammal species has been discovered to glow in shades of red and pink when illuminated by ultraviolet (UV) lamp, through a phenomenon known as photoluminescence. In UV-photoluminescence, UV light is absorbed by a substance and reemitted […]
A new adventure starts for me today, back in Paris! I am returning to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle as a Research engineer (short-term contract), appointed to the European research platform IPANEMA dedicated to ancient materials (Gif-sur-Yvette). I will be […]
The invasion of land by animals, followed by the establishment of complex continental ecosystems, is a critical event in the history of life on our planet. Nonetheless, little is known about most of the pivotal morphological and physiological adaptations imposed […]
Even the most spectacularly preserved fossils, with soft tissues ‘petrified’ as the product of a complex interplay of biological and geological processes, have experienced alterations that distort palaeontological reconstructions. Many works have now emphasized the need to precisely constrain these […]
A paper long in the making, which I led while a postdoc at SOLEIL and IPANEMA, is finally published today in the journal Geology. In this article, I investigated exceptional preservation through phosphatization from a fossil perspective. Soft-tissue phosphatization, i.e., […]
In a paper led by Farid Saleh (University of Lyon) and published this month in Geobios, we provide insights into soft tissue taphonomy in the Fezouata Shale based on a detailed sedimentological investigation constraining the facies in which exceptional preservation […]