Kingdom of the Atlas (my Morocco adventures)

DrAliceClement

Earlier this year I visited northern Africa for the first time. I was in Morocco for two weeks to attend the 18th ISELV meeting (for the uninitiated, that stands for the International Symposium on Early and Lower Vertebrates, this is my absolute favourite conference!). ISELV was held at the Hassan 1st University in Berrechid, (not too far from Casablanca), co-organised by that University but also the University of Zurich. This was my 5th ISELV meeting, having previously attended those in Australia (Melbourne), Poland, China, and Canada.

During the meeting I gave a talk about lungfish brains “But wait, there’s more? New lungfish (Sarcopterygii, Dipnoi) cranial endocasts from the Late Devonian (Frasnian) Gogo Formation, Australia, with ontogenetic insights from Neoceratodus”, but together with Kate Trinajstic, I also gave a brief presentation honouring the work and legacy of our friend and mentor Prof. John Long on the occasion of his retirement. John has made a truly impressive scientific impact on the field of vertebrate palaeontology, but other themes such as his enthusiasm for fieldwork, generosity (and beer drinking!) were common subjects that our community also thanked him for!

Before the conference itself, I was lucky enough to get along on one of the two field trips connected to the conference. This trip focussed mostly on the Mesozoic of the Western Atlas, but we visited sites that ranged in age from the Carboniferous to Neogene (this is a remarkably long length of time!) Beyond the variety of outcrop that we could visit, the changing landscapes from the coast up to the high Atlas (and back) were absolutely breath-taking!

We started in Berrechid, and our first stop were the phosphate successions in the Ouled Abdoun Basin where we could visit private collections with some truly remarkable marine reptiles and sharks. Next we spent some time at the M’goun UNESCO Geopark Museum (to see Atlasaurus) and the stunning Ouzoud waterfalls nearby. Around Demnate and Anza we saw a lot of dinosaur trackways (many sauropod and theropod tracks), as well as pterosaur footprints preserved on the beach, as well as a small but lovely local museum in Agadir.

Next up were some Cambrian archaeocyathids (extinct reef-building sponges) and trilobites near Taroudant (although the trilobotes were hard to find!), and Carboniferous deposits in the Souss Basin, near Lamnizla, where I found some lovely plant material. Next we examined some Permian trace fossils, Triassic metoposaurids (temnospondyl amphibians), and dinosaur traces in the Argana Basin. To finish off we headed into Marrakesh the historic “Red City” which has a bustling UNESCO-listed Medina (old city) and vibrant souk areas where you could bargin for treasures to your heart’s content.

A HUGE thanks to Christian, Abdel, Merle, Amin, Jorge and everyone else involved in putting on this fabulous conference and field trip! We were so very well looked after. I am looking forward to the next meeting in 2027 in Sweden, Uppsala.

The enigma from Gogo

DrAliceClement

ENIGMA /ɪˈnɪɡmə,ɛˈnɪɡmə/

noun, a person or thing that is mysterious or difficult to understand.

Since 2011, there has persisted a mysterious specimen known from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Australia. Dubbed Cainocara enigma by authors Ken Campbell and Dick Barwick, who first studied it, they published a work entitled “A new unusual Osteichthyan fish from the Gogo Formation, Western Australia“, but considered this single specimen so strange that they could not identify it any further than some kind of bony fish…

Fast forward to 2024, and enter my dedicated and hard-working 3rd year research student, Hannah Thiele, who used CT scans of this, well, BLOB of a fossil (there really is no other way to describe it!) and specialised 3D segmenting software to solve the mystery of just what the enigma really was!

A photo of the enigma from Gogo, housed in the Australian National University fossil collection.

By reconstructing the internal space of this mysterious fossil, Hannah was able to identify a cranial endocast, the space inside the skull that usually houses the brain. In doing so, we could identify features that helped us to orient the specimen correctly and interpret it accurately. This meant we could solve the mystery once and for all!

We deduced that the enigma from Gogo was most likely the poorly-preserved, and heavily-weathered braincase of a lungfish. Exactly which one we don’t know, but something similar to the short snouted forms such as Chirodipterus or Holodipterus.

Hannah, together with myself and colleagues John Long (Flinders) and Joseph Bevitt (ANSTO), published a paper detailing the results earlier this year in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, with “Deciphering Cainocara enigma from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation, Australia“.

Lead author, Hannah Thiele, presenting her results on the Gogo enigma at the CAVEPS meeting in 2025.

If you are keen to read more, see the news article “Missing pieces added to ancient global fish puzzle” published on Scimex. After this work, Hannah continued her study on fish brains at Flinders University, and has now commenced her PhD.

CAVEPS 2025

DrAliceClement

Well, what a week it was! During the last week of November (yes, sorry this post is so late!), we hosted some 200 palaeontologists on Kaurna Yarta / Adelaide for the 19th Conference of Australasian Vertebrate Evolution, Palaeontology and Systematics (CAVEPS) 2025.

Aaron Camens and Uncle Micky at the welcome to country ceremony (centre), enjoying the welcome function at the Mantra with friends and colleagues (right).

CAVEPS is a multidisciplinary forum for vertebrate palaeontologists, earth scientists, evolutionary biologists, and fossil enthusiasts from Australasia and beyond. The conference features the latest research in vertebrate palaeontology, including morphology, phylogeny, systematics, evolution, taphonomy, development, zooarchaeology and palaeoecology. The event is generally held every two years or so, and hosted by different institutions around Australia and New Zealand.

We provided pre- and post- conference field trips, where participants unearthed some important fossil finds ! By holding this conference here in South Australia, and holding field trips at the Naracoorte Caves and Ikara‑Flinders Ranges, we hoped to highlight the unique geological and fossil-heritage of this particular and spectacular part of Australia.

Before the main conference program, we had “Workshop Monday”, where attendees could participate in a range of workshops covering everything from submitting to high profile journals, bench-marking and bibliometrics, media training, musculoskeletal modelling, 3D digital reconstruction and animation, moulding and casting, and aworkshop covering best practises for collaborating with indigenous peoples.  

Enjoying ourselves at the conference dinner, at Marion Hotel (left and middle); Alice with conference co-organisers Diana Fusco and Aaron Camens (right).

Over the subsequent 4 days, the CAVEPS scientific program featured 78 scientific presentations and 35 posters covering all the facets of vertebrate palaeontology and evolution. We were also very privileged to have four fantastic invited plenary speakers:
o Prof. Robin Beck (University of Salford) on metatherian systematics;
o Dr. Jacqueline Nguyen (Australian Museum / Flinders University) on songbird evolution;
o Dr. Peter Bishop (Harvard University) on synapsid locomotor evolution;
o Mr. David Elliot OAM (Australian Age of Dinosaurs) telling us all about AUSTRALIA’S GREATEST UNTOLD STORY.

I’m extremely proud to have been a part of THE BIGGEST CAVEPS ever, and it is great to see so many students, making up >55% of all attendees. The future seems to be in good hands. It was a mammoth (Diprotodontian?) effort to bring this event together, and I certainly couldn’t have done it without the support and enthusiasm of my co-organisers, Dr Diana Fusco and Dr Aaron Camens, the generous support from our sponsors and Flinders University, along with a veritable assemblage of amazing volunteers! I am very much looking forward to attending (and not organising) the next one over in Otago, New Zealand in 2027!

A holy trinity of papers?

DrAliceClement

In what feels like a bit of a flurry, three papers have been published this month.

First, Macroevolutionary role reversals in the earliest radiation of bony fishes, published in Current Biology led by Emily M. Troyer and Rafael A. Rivero-Vega, with contributions from Xindong Cui, Min Zhu, Tuo Qiao, Hadeel H. Saad, Rodrigo T. Figueroa, James V. Andrews, Alice M. Clement (that’s me!), Oleg A. Lebedev, Robert Higgins, Benjamin Igielman, Stephanie E. Pierce, Sam Giles, and Matt Friedman.

This is a really impressive paper that examines jaw shape in 86 species of Palaeozoic bony fish, and found that in stark contrast to their depauperate disparity today, lungfish and coelacanths had especially diverse, rapidly evolving jaws early on in their history. And, as a further inversion of modern-day patterns, the early ray-finned fishes had low disparity and slow rates of jaw evolution. I love just how “out there” lungfish (Dipnoi, in orange below) were!

Contrasting patterns of jaw-shape space exploration among early bony fishes.
Figure from Troyer et al. (2025) Current Biology.

Next, New specimens of the arthrodire Bullerichthys fascidens Dennis and Miles 1980 show incipient site-specific osteichthyan-like tooth addition and resorption, was published in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology a week ago. This work was led by Kate Trinajstic, with input from co-authors Zerina Johanson, Carole Burrow, Moya Meredith Smith, John Long, Alice Clement, Brian Choo, Anton Maksimenko & Vincent Dupret.

This paper shows that the ability to reshape and shed their dentition can be traced as far back as our distant placoderm ancestors, using evidence from some really well preserved material of a fish called Bullerichthys from the Devonian-age Gogo Formation that we imaged using powerful synchrotron light to reveal the microstructure within their teeth.

Artist’s impression of Bullerichthys. Image credit: Brian Choo

Lastly, a really cool palaeoecological study was published this week, entitled Trait-space disparity in fish communities spanning 380 million years from the Late Devonian to present, published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

This one was another big group effort, led by John Llewelyn, with input from John A. Long, Richard Cloutier, Alice M. Clement, Giovanni Strona, Frédérik Saltré, Michael S.Y. Lee, Brian Choo, Kate Trinajstic, Olivia Vanhaesebroucke, Austin Fitzpatrick and Corey J.A. Bradshaw.

In it we compared diversity of various fish traits (such as mouth position, tail shape and so on) through space and time by comparing three Late Devonian fish communities, which included a tropical reef (Gogo, Australia), a tropical estuary (Miguasha, Canada), and a temperate freshwater system (Canowindra, Australia), compared against six modern communities from diverse habitats. By doing so we could show that Devonian and modern fish communities differ in trait composition, but that habitat and climate patterns are consistent across at least 380 million years of evolution!

Graphical abstract from Llewelyn et al. (2025)

A tale of two Joshuas…

DrAliceClement

Nope, I am not about to talk about figures from the Hebrew Bible (you’re certainly in the wrong place if that is what you’re after), but instead some fantastic student-led work that was published recently by two of my students.

Joshua Batt posing with a fossil rhizodont.
Joshua Bland CT scanning some fossil lungfish.

Firstly, Joshua Bland, who was an Honours student of mine at Flinders University during 2022-23, has published a paper in the mulitidisciplinary journal iScience with the title “Comparison of diverse mandibular mechanics during biting in Devonian lungfishes“.

He worked on fossil lungfishes from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation, of northern Western Australia, which are beautifully preserved in 3D. Gogo is an interesting site for lungfishes, as this ancient tropical reef preserves the most diverse assemblage of lungfish species in any space or time from throughout their 400 million year history.

Graphical abstract from Bland et al. (2025) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589004225012313

The lungfish at Gogo are taxonomically diverse (many species), but also morphologically disparate (anatomically different from each other). We wondered how this may impact function, did their jaws work biomechanically differently from one another?

To answer this question, Josh used a technique adapted from engineering, called Finite Element Analysis (FEA). FEA is a computer-based method used to predict how structures respond to external forces by calculating the stress and strain within small, divided elements of the object. The first use of FEA in palaeontology was by Emily Rayfield and colleagues on the skull of a large theropod dinosaur in 2001, so its use remains quite recent for the field, and our study is the most comprehensive application to fossil fishes published thus far (yay!).

Generalised methods figure from Bland et al. (2025) showing stepwise
process to solve Finite Element Models of fossil lungfish mandibles (lower jaws) during biting.

Together with our co-authors, Hugo Dutel, John A. Long, Matteo Fabbri, Joseph Bevitt, and Kate Trinajstic, and our very own FEA guru, Olga Panagiotopoulou, we found a diversity of stress and strain experienced by our lower jaw models, with some surprising results. This diversity of jaw morphology and biomechanics seen among the lungfish at Gogo may have been one of the reasons driving their great success. Different lungfish were adapted for eating very different things and so weren’t in resource competition with each other.

Our comprehensive dataset offers the most detailed quantification of biting performance in any fossil fish thus far, providing biomechanical evidence for diverse feeding adaptations and niche partitioning within Gogo lungfishes.

And then to add to the excitement, another paper was published in the same week from another Joshua! This time it was current PhD student, Joshua Batt, publishing his first peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology with “New rhizodontid (Tetrapodomorpha, Sarcopterygii) material from Romer’s gap (Tournaisian) of the Ballagan Formation (Scotland, UK).”

Working together with Dr Tom Challands, from the University of Edinburgh, researchers at Flinders University have been busy preparing and describing a real beast of a fish from the Early Carboniferous of the UK. The specimen was extracted by Tom and colleagues from Burnmouth in Scotland, but 10 or so large blocks of material came to Australia in 2020 for further study. Painstaking mechanical preparation has been done by Carey Burke and revealed what is likely to be one of, if not the most, complete articulated rhizodont fish known.

John Long, Carey Burke and Josh Batt inspect a specimen of fossil rhizodont at Flinders University.

Rhizodonts were large predatory lobe-finned fishes that lived throughout the Devonian and Carboniferous periods, usually in freshwater or estuarine environments. Some are thought to have grown as big as seven meters in length and they had very big teeth. Not a fish I would like to swim with!

Josh started working on this material for his Honours project during 2024, and there still remains a lot of it to be formally described, especially post-cranial material, but this first “rapid communication” paper presents the “main skull block”. Is this thing more beauty or beast… (perhaps beauty really is in the eye of the beholder?)

Image from Batt et al. (2025) JVP showing the dorsal view of NMS G.2025.10.1.1.

Needless to say, I felt very proud seeing two of my students have their first peer-reviewed publications come out. I expect more good things to come from both of them.

Want more? You can find both of these fantastic papers via the links below:

Science, SPring-8, and Sushi!

DrAliceClement

It seems I had such a “SPring” in my step, I completely forgot to write about my trip to Japan in November last year!

Thanks to a Flinders University International Research Engagement grant, I had the means to visit SPring-8 (the world’s largest third-generation synchrotron radiation facility) to work with my collaborator A/Prof. Tatsuya Hirasawa scanning embryos of the Australian lungfish, Neoceratodus forsteri.

The Japanese synchrotron, known as SPring-8, is nestled atop a mountain in Hyōgo Prefecture in the Kansai region of Japan. The nearest major cities are Osaka and Kobe. Sika deer amble through the grounds which are frequently shrouded in fog (they inspired me to write a haiku), and somewhat unusually for synchrotron facilities, there are paths to ride bicycles inside!

The team at SPring-8, Japan, after a successful experiment.

Sika deer through fog

SPring-8 autumnal mountain

Embryos revealed.

I was there working with Tatsuya Hirasawa and his team to image an ontogenetic (referring to the development of an organism throughout its lifespan) sequence of the Australian lungfish. I’ve previously worked on this animal to describe aspects of its brain (Clement et al. 2015) and muscle (Ziermann et al. 2017) anatomy (but see also Challands et al. 2020 where we discuss brains AND muscles in the same paper!)

Even though I had worked at the ANSTO Australian Synchrotron and ESRF in Grenoble before, I had never scanned tiny embryos of animals, and so learnt a lot about the preparation and parameters best suited to this kind of material. Other researchers working with us included Hiroki Higashiyama, as well as Toru Kawanishi and Kiiri Hama, respectively scanning either chicken embryos or bichir fish fins.

Left to right: Tatsuya Hirasawa, Masato Hoshino (beamline scientis), Toru Kawanishi, Hiroki Higashiyama, Kiiri Hama, and Alice Clement, using BL20B2 beamline at SPring-8, Japan.

Following on from our successful synchrotron experiment, I spent a week in Tokyo. I was honoured to give an Evolutionary Morphology seminar at the beautiful and historic campus of the University of Tokyo (those ginkgo leaves!) and visit Tatsuya Hirasawa’s lab. Tatsuya Hirasawa and his group analyse fossil specimens using synchrotron radiation, as well as developmental genetic analyses of living animals at the gene and cellular level to investigate “Evo-Devo” of vertebrates. To his group and other guests from various institutions in Tokyo, I presented research on “Digital Palaeontology of the Early Vertebrates” to a very engaged and interesting group.

Evolutionary Morphology seminar, University of Tokyo, Japan, November 2024.
Alice and Tatsuya at the University of Tokyo.

I also took the opportunity to travel nearby Tsukuba to visit A/Prof. Daichi Suzuki (University of Tsukuba), whom I had met recently at the ISELV meeting in Quebec. He investigates the evolutionary origin of the vertebrate brain and consciousness, which is absolutely fascinating! Whilst there I got to look at some cool lamprey scans he and his students are working on, and give a palaeontology seminar. Biiiiiiiiiiiiiig thanks to the amazing Chisako Sakata for the tour of the National Museum of Nature and Science Tsukuba Research Center!

Visiting the National Museum of Nature and Science Tsukuba Research Center with my family.
Paleomorphology Seminar, University of Tsukuba.

I had such a wonderful time in Japan, AND was lucky enough to get back briefly less than two months after this visit for the 4th International Coelacanth Symposium, also held in Tokyo. Two visits in close succession was a great reason to revive my old high school Japanese… (また日本に行きたい!) That being said, I can’t wait for the next trip!!!

350 million-year-old reptile footprints

DrAliceClement

Snakes, lizards, turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs… these are all reptile animals, and were thought to have first appeared about 315 million years ago in a time period called the Carboniferous (Bashkirian). The oldest evidence of these animals, amniotes, which eventually gave rise to all reptile, birds and mammals alive today, was known from sites in Europe and North America.

Imagine a palaeontologists’ excitement then, when enthusiastic fossil fossickers from Mansfield, Victoria, get in touch about an interesting slab of rock they have found in even older Carboniferous rocks. Citizen scientists John Eason and Craig Eury discovered a slab of rock from Taungurung Country, Mansfield, covered in trackways (fossil footprints) showing not just distinct toe imprints, but obvious claw marks, meaning these must have been made by an amniote, not amphibian, track maker.

The age of these rocks is securely dated, and so our finding pushes pack the known origin of reptile-like animals ~35 million years older than previously known!

The team are thrilled to announce our latest paper was published today in the highly prestigious journal Nature, Earliest amniote tracks recalibrate the timeline of tetrapod evolution, led by Prof John Long, our amazing citizen scientists, John Eason and Craig Eury, who found the fossil, as well as Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, Jillian Garvey, Aaron Camens, Per Ahlberg, and myself.

Aaron Camens, John Long, Alice Clement (image: Flinders University)
Per Ahlberg & Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki (image: Alice Clement)

Polish artist Marcin Ambrozik recreated a life reconstruction of “Manny” our adorable little 350 million-year-old amniote, and Monkeystack Creative Studio bought them to life in the awesome video below:

This discovery has significant implications not only for reptile evolution, but for all tetrapods (four-limbed animals with backbones). By pushing back the earliest origin of reptile-like animals to the earliest Carboniferous (Tournaisian), it means that the records of other earlier groups (with complicated names like temnospondyls, seymouriamorphs, diadectomorphs, baphetids and colosteids) might have much older origins than previously appreciated and require some level of “re-calibration”.

Even more excitingly, I think this discovery sheds light on Australia, as part of the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana, as a place ripe for exploration and other major discoveries. Who knows what else lies out there awaiting discovery?

Want more?

Canowindra Capers

DrAliceClement

I have just returned from a week in NSW central west with ~25 students from Flinders University. Our fieldtrip visited two significant vertebrate palaeontology sites in the area, the Wellington Caves, which have captured the bones of mega (and mini-) fauna over the last few million years in an ancient limestone cave complete with sparkling geological “Cathedral” features.

Just 90 minutes from Wellington lies the township of Canowindra, a site of exceptional preservation (lagerstätte) from the Late Devonian (Famennian) age. I’ve known about this site since I first started studying fossil fish, but had somehow never visited before now.

An ancient meandering river system is thought to have captured a mass of fish in a channel cutoff from the main river, which eventually dried up capturing thousands of fish in a shrinking drying billabong 363 million years ago. Evidence of the site was first recognised when a slab of rock was upended revealing curious marks underneath during the 1950s. A Canowindra local, and then the curator at the Australian Museum in Sydney could see these were unusual curious fossil fish from days gone by.

Later, Palaeontologist Dr Alex Ritchie of the Australian Museum, conducted an excavation in 1993, at that time he and his team collected approximately ~3000 fish specimens from a single layer within the Upper Devonian Mandagery Sandstone. Many of these specimens are now on display in the FANTASTIC Age of Fishes Museum.

The site itself is Late Devonian (Famennian) in age, capturing a moment in time ~363 million years ago. More than ~3000 fossils have been unearthed from a single rock layer within the Upper Devonian Mandagery Sandstone.

The accumulation of fish fossils from drought conditions points to a single palaeocommunity, with trace fossils such as ripple marks suggesting a fluviatile (billabong) environment. The preservation of the Canowindra fauna indicates that the fish became isolated in a temporary pool of water, which rapidly dried up. The concentration of all the fish packed upon one another in the layer suggests a mass mortality event due to these dry conditions.

The original fossil fish dig site.

So far there are eight species of fossil fish recognised from the Canowindra site, with one of those still awaiting formal description. The fauna is dominated by the two named species of antiarch placoderms (jawed, armoured fishes), Bothriolepis and Remigolepis, comprising some 97% of the fauna! The other placoderm, Groenlandaspis, an arthrodiran placoderm, is much rarer, with just ~50 specimens recovered. The sarcopterygians (lobe-finned fishes) are even rarer still, with the remains of approximately 20 individuals across five genera, found so far.

We were warmly welcomed to Canowindra by the new owners of the property containing the original fossil fish site, David and Aleysha McGrath, as well as by the staff of the Age of Fishes Museum. We kicked the week off with a public talk held at the bowling club where I spoke about “The Devonian Age of Fishes, from an Australian Perspective”. It was fabulous to see so many locals turn up for the event and there were many good questions and curiosity about the future of the site (I believe it is in very good hands).

David, Aleysha and Alice on site at the original fossil fish dig site.

It was a delight to take the students out into the field to see the site of the original dig and even identify a few previously undiscovered fossils from big blocks of the sandstone. The site is dominated in abundance by the placoderms, but we were shown an enigmatic new specimen that looked decidedly lobe-y. There are five species of lobe-finned fish known from the site, but these are rare occurrences. At first, we thought it might be a large individual of a long-snouted lungfish, but after taking a silicone impression of the specimen (using a special putty) we could identify it as a large individual of Mandageria fairfaxi, the biggest beast from the ancient waters of Canowindra. Mandageria holds the special honour as being the state fossil emblem of NSW!

Read more: Incidentally, do you know your own state fossil emblem?

ACT — NSW — QLD — SA — VIC — WA — (get your act together TAS & NT!)

Austin, Alice and Ramon taking a silicone mould of a fossil still encased in the rock.

After a morning in the field, we took the students for an afternoon at the fantastic Age of Fishes Museum. This is a really fabulous local museum where real specimens are on display showing the exceptional preservation of hundreds of whole fish bodies preserved jam-packed upon one another in their final moments. The high quality of the interpretive material and exhibits, truly welcoming staff, and sunny picnic spot outside make it well worth a visit! Our students perused the gallery and we learnt to identify and distinguish the different fish known from Canowindra. We spoke about the distribution and relative abundance of the various groups, and what palaeoecological and biogeographical implications could be drawn from that. We rounded out our afternoon with a look through the additional slabs held in the storage shed, with a surface scanning demonstration and practise session.  

PhD students, Austin (left) and Ramon (right), working and teaching in the field.

4th International Coelacanth Symposium

DrAliceClement

Do you know what was the greatest zoological discovery of the 20th century? Many people would probably say that it was the discovery and identification of a living coelacanth fish (Latimeria), dragged up from the oceanic depths off the coast of Southern Africa. This discovery revived a lineage of fish that had been thought extinct for 70 million years!

Alice Clement with Latimeria chalumnae, at the JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Makhanda (Grahamstown, South Africa)

I’ve written about coelacanths several times before: fossil ones, living ones, and even “living fossil” ones, but this month was the first time I attended a scientific symposium dedicated wholly to this enigmatic and enduring group of fishes.

I was fortunate enough to attend the 4th International Coelacanth Symposium, held at Josai University, in Tokyo, Japan. The meeting was co-organised with Aquamarine Fukushima Marine Science Museum and attracted speakers from 7 countries (somewhat remarkably spanning all 6 continents except Antarctica).

Coelacanth scientists at the 4th ICS. Back row, L-R: Frensly D. Hukom (Indonesia), Gaël Clément (France), Yoshitaka Yabumoto (Japan), Camila Cupello (Brazil), Paulo M. Brito (Brazil), Alexis Chappuis (France), Alice Clement (Australia), Shinya Miyata (Japan), Yuji Takakuwa (Japan), Shinya Yamauchi (Japan). Front row: Masamitsu Iwata (Japan), Kerry Sink (South Africa), Tatsuya Hirasawa (Japan), Augy Syahailatua (Indonesia).

The speakers were a diverse range of scientists who covered everything from ecology and conservation of living populations, anatomy, as well as the evolution and disparity of fossil forms, and much more. I spoke about our recently described new fossil coelacanth from Australia, Ngamugawi wirngarri, and rates of evolution in the group since their appearance in the fossil record ~410 million years ago.

Many thanks to the organising committee (Masamitsu Iwata, Yoshitaka Yabumoto, Paulo M. Brito, and Shinya Miyata) for such a fabulous meeting, and I am very much looking forward to the next one (2027 in Indonesia, perhaps?). We were very well looked after in Tokyo, and it will be an honour to collaborate with this fabulous group of researchers!

ありがとうございました!!!

What’s the best thing about lungfishes?

DrAliceClement

THAT is a difficult question to answer.

Is it that they breathe air? Is it their weird teeth? Their ginormous genomes? Is it that they have some of the same bones in their fins that we have in our own arms? Is it that their lineage stretches back over 400 million years and they are some of the most enduring, long-lived species alive today? Maybe it is their cute little beady eyes?

For my final post for 2024, I’ll direct you to a “Quick Guide” all about lungfishes, published today in Current Biology***. I hope you enjoy it!

Neoceratodus forsteri & Homo sapiens enjoying each other’s company.

*** if you can’t get behind the paywall, send me a message and I can supply a special “share link” to access the article. Current Biology, “Lungfishes” article available here: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01221-1?rss=yes