Aaron Woodruff, Paleontologist
Read the blog write-up about Aaron Woodruff, Paleo Lab Tech extraordinaire, and his love of paleontology!...
iCCB Executive Meeting
iCCB (Integrative Climate Change Biology) is an incredibly successful program, funded primarily by the IUBS (International Union of Biological Sciences), to develop trait-based approaches that can make deep-time perspectives from paleontology applicable for understanding organisms’ responses to climate change. During its last round of funding, the IUBS tasked the iCCB with making inroads with...
NTC Fossil Matrix Arrived!
After several months of learning how to ship pallets and negotiating prices, our pallet full of Natural Trap Cave Matrix has arrived from Des Moines! We now have 1300 lbs of sacks containing soil, rocks, and (most importantly) fossils from Natural Trap Cave’s latest excavations. Each of these sacks was collected with careful, fine-scale...
this semester: Fossil Wednesday tutorials!
Fossil Wednesdays have been a great success thus far this year. We have a whole slew of new attendees, and we are getting through a bunch of material. In fact, we are nearly entirely through our 3,000-year-old Holocene layer- likely one more week! We’ve picked thousands of fossils out of this layer. I’ll give...
NTC Taphonomy!
How did so many small mammal, lizard, bird, & fish bones get concentrated at Natural Trap Cave?!? Aaron has already databased >16,000 bones & teeth!!! The answer, it seems, is that packrats gather bones from the surface around the cave entrance, and then stash them in their nests along the inner rim of the...
Climate resilience NSF has begun!
In just a few weeks, Yue Wang will join the lab to begin examining the landscape characteristics of regions that exhibit long periods of community stasis despite global climate change occurring. Welcome to the lab, Yue!...
Natural Trap Cave 2017
July 8-19, Jenny & Aaron experienced their last year of fieldwork at Natural Trap Cave for the foreseeable future. Jenny spent 7 consecutive days in the cave, and was extremely productive. She analyzed and mapped the stratigraphy of the south wall of the excavation section, and sampled each strata for microfauna. She also sampled...