New “stem-tetrapod” paper out today!

I’ve just surfaced in Berlin and my jet lag-addled mind is pleased to see my latest paper, co-authored with my Flinders University colleagues, John Long and Brian Choo, published today in the Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (now that’s a mouthful!).

The paper is entitled “New Insights into the origins and radiation of the mid-Palaeozoic Gondwanan stem tetrapods.” In it, we provide new detail about Koharalepis, a fish from the Middle Devonian Aztec Siltstone of Antarctica, using 3D synchrotron data. We also propose some alternate biogeographical and phylogenetic models of stem tetrapod origins and radiations with a distinctly Gondwanan perspective (remembering that Gondwana was the great southern supercontinent that Australia and Antarctica were once a part of).

The paper forms part of a special volume written in honour of Prof. Jenny Clack, who has been seminal in studies of the “fish-tetrapod” transition, and who wrote the absolutely wonderful Gaining Ground: the Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods. It has been an absolute honour to get to meet Jenny at various conferences over the last decade, and her impact to the field of early vertebrate evolution shall never be forgotten.