Sandra J. Carlson is an American invertebrate paleontologist specialized in brachiopods. [1] She is a professor emerita in the department of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis. [1] She was president of the Paleontological Society in 2013. [2]
Carlson completed a B.S. in earth sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. [3] She completed a M.S. and Ph.D. in geological sciences (paleontology) from the University of Michigan. [3] Her 1986 dissertation was titled, Ontogenetic and Evolutionary Trends in the Articulate Brachiopod Hinge Mechanism. [4] Daniel Fisher was Carlson's doctoral advisor. [4]
Paleontology, also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch. It includes the study of fossils to classify organisms and study their interactions with each other and their environments. Paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuvier's work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century. The term has been used since 1822 formed from Greek παλαιός, ὄν, and λόγος.
Sandra Moore Faber is an American astrophysicist known for her research on the evolution of galaxies. She is the University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and works at the Lick Observatory. She has made discoveries linking the brightness of galaxies to the speed of stars within them and was the co-discoverer of the Faber–Jackson relation. Faber was also instrumental in designing the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.
Geerat J. Vermeij is a Dutch-born paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis. He studies marine molluscs, both as fossils and as living creatures, as well as influence creatures have on each other's evolutionary fates, alongside having worked on plants, crabs, extinction, biological invasions, and biogeography. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992, and in 2000, was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He was also a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 1992 and was awarded the Fellows Medal from the California Academy of Sciences in 2017.
The Obolellata are a class of Rhynchonelliform brachiopods with two orders, Obolellida and Naukatida. They are essentially restricted to the lower-middle Cambrian.
Alison Davis-Blake is an American academic administrator. She served as the eighth president of Bentley University. Before Bentley, she served as dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. At Ross, Davis-Blake was the school’s first female dean, and at the time of her appointment she was the highest-ranking female dean at any U.S. business school.
Strophomenida is an extinct order of articulate brachiopods which lived from the lower Ordovician period to the mid Carboniferous period. Strophomenida is part of the extinct class Strophomenata, and was the largest known order of brachiopods, encompassing over 400 genera. Some of the largest and heaviest known brachiopod species belong to this class. Strophomenids were among the most diverse and abundant brachiopods during the Ordovician, but their diversity was strongly impacted at the Late Ordovician mass extinction. Survivors rediversified into new morphologies in the Silurian, only to be impacted once again at the Late Devonian mass extinction. However, they still survived till the mid Carboniferous.
Brachiopods, phylum Brachiopoda, are a phylum of trochozoan animals that have hard "valves" (shells) on the upper and lower surfaces, unlike the left and right arrangement in bivalve molluscs. Brachiopod valves are hinged at the rear end, while the front can be opened for feeding or closed for protection. Two major categories are traditionally recognized, articulate and inarticulate brachiopods. The word "articulate" is used to describe the tooth-and-groove structures of the valve-hinge which is present in the articulate group, and absent from the inarticulate group. This is the leading diagnostic skeletal feature, by which the two main groups can be readily distinguished as fossils. Articulate brachiopods have toothed hinges and simple, vertically oriented opening and closing muscles. Conversely, inarticulate brachiopods have weak, untoothed hinges and a more complex system of vertical and oblique (diagonal) muscles used to keep the two valves aligned. In many brachiopods, a stalk-like pedicle projects from an opening near the hinge of one of the valves, known as the pedicle or ventral valve. The pedicle, when present, keeps the animal anchored to the seabed but clear of sediment which would obstruct the opening.
John Alroy is a paleobiologist born in New York in 1966 and now residing in Sydney, Australia.
Rhynchonelliformea is a major subphylum and clade of brachiopods. It is roughly equivalent to the former class Articulata, which was used previously in brachiopod taxonomy up until the 1990s. These so-called articulated brachiopods have many anatomical differences relative to "inarticulate" brachiopods of the subphyla Linguliformea and Craniformea. Articulates have hard calcium carbonate shells with tongue-and-groove hinge articulations and separate sets of simple opening and closing muscles.
Trimerellida is an extinct order of craniate brachiopods, containing the sole superfamily Trimerelloidea and the families Adensuidae, Trimerellidae, and Ussuniidae. Trimerellidae was a widespread family of warm-water brachiopods ranging from the Middle Ordovician to the late Silurian (Ludlow). Adensuidae and Ussuniidae are monogeneric families restricted to the Ordovician of Kazakhstan. Most individuals were free-living, though some clustered into large congregations similar to modern oyster reefs.
Margaret Galland Kivelson is an American space physicist, planetary scientist, and distinguished professor emerita of space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 2010 to the present, concurrent with her appointment at UCLA, Kivelson has been a research scientist and scholar at the University of Michigan. Her primary research interests include the magnetospheres of Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Isabel Patricia Montañez is a paleoclimatologist specializing in geochemical records of ancient climate change. She is a distinguished professor and a Chancellor's Leadership Professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Davis. As of 2021, Montañez is the director of the UC Davis Institute of the Environment.
Sarah T. Stewart-Mukhopadhyay is an American planetary scientist known for studying planet formation, planetary geology, and materials science. She is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department. She was a professor at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 2003 to 2014.
Productida is an extinct order of brachiopods in the extinct class Strophomenata. Members of Productida first appeared during the Silurian. They represented the most abundant group of brachiopods during the Permian period, accounting for 45-70% of all species. The vast majority of species went extinct during the Permian-Triassic extinction event, though a handful survived into the Early Triassic. Many productids are covered in hollow tubular spines, which are characteristic of the group. A number of functions for the spines have been proposed, including as a defensive mechanism against predators.
Louise H. Kellogg was an American geophysicist with expertise in chemical geodynamics and computational geophysics and experience in leading multidisciplinary teams to advance geodynamics modeling and scientific visualization. Kellogg was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Davis and director of the Computational Infrastructure for Geodynamics. She was also a major contributor to the Deep Carbon Observatory project of the Sloan Foundation.
Nancy B. Simmons is an American zoologist, mammalogist, professor, and author. Specializing in bats, Simmons has conducted extensive research on the morphology and evolutionary history of numerous bat species. She is also the curator-in-charge of the Department of Mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History and a professor at the Richard Gilder Graduate School.
Alycia L. Stigall is an American palaeontologist. As a professor at Ohio University, she was the first to analyze the biogeographic ranges of Paleozoic fossils using Geographic information systems.
Marginifera is an extinct genus of brachiopod belonging to the order Productida. Specimens have been found in Carboniferous to Triassic beds in Asia, Europe, Madagascar, and North America.
Caroline A. E. Strömberg is a Swedish-American paleontologist whose primary research focuses on the deep time evolution and ecology of plants through the use of the fossil record and by comparison with modern analogues, more specifically how previous plant communities changed in response to climate change and how plant evolution affected animal evolution. She is currently the Estella B. Leopold Professor of Biology and an adjunct associate professor in Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington and the Curator of Paleobotany at the affiliated Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.
Rowan Lockwood is an American paleobiologist specializing in environmental change and the ecology of fossil marine invertebrates. She is professor of geology at College of William & Mary. Lockwood has served as the president-elect of the Paleontological Society since 2024.