Salamanca Villegas, S., van Soelen, E.E., Teunissen van Manen, M.L., Flantua, S.G.A., Santos, R.V., Roddaz, M., Dantas, E.L., van Loon, E., Sinninghe Damsté, J.S., Kim, J. & Hoorn, C. (2016) Amazon forest dynamics under changing abiotic conditions in the early Miocene (Colombian Amazonia). Journal of Biogeography online. DOI: 10.1111/jbi.12769
15:00-15:30 Frank Wesselingh & the PRIDE team How high can you get? Mountain uplift driving diversification in Pontocaspian lakes before humans bring down the unique aquatic biota?
15:30-16:00 Christiaan van Baak Mediterranean-Paratethys connectivity during the late Miocene to recent
– 16:00-16:15 tea/coffee break –
16:15-17:15 Keith Richards Studies in Caspian palynology: Vegetation, climate and sea level change
17:15-18:00
Questions and discussion
Bermúdez, M.A., Hoorn, C., Bernet, M., Carrillo, E., van der Beek, P.A., Garver, J.I., Mora, J.L. & Mehrkian, K. (2015) The detrital record of late-Miocene to Pliocene surface uplift and exhumation of the Venezuelan Andes in the Maracaibo and Barinas foreland basins. Basin Research. DOI: 10.1111/bre.12154
It’s very nice to be invited to write something for this blog, let me introduce myself a little bit.
I am a MSc Earth Sciences student at the University of Amsterdam. Currently I am working on my master thesis at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, under supervision of Niels Raes, Willem Renema and William Gosling. We are looking at species migration between Australia and Asia during the Miocene, and we compare it to migration between N and S America at the dawn of the Great American Biotic Interchange. To do so I’m analysing data on fossil occurrences in Australia and Southeast Asia. Hopefully this research will lead to interesting new insights.
Before starting my MSc Earth Sciences I did a bachelor in Biology at Leiden University. I decided to do a master’s in Earth Sciences because it offered a broader perspective of the natural world and its processes.
I like analysing and sorting out data like I’m currently doing for my thesis with fossil occurrence data. It also played a major role in my internship at TNO – Caribbean Branche Office, where I was involved in starting a database containing information on Aruba’s subsurface. During my internship I also experienced the “Green Aruba” conference and was involved in organising a geological excursion for some of the attendants. I am very interested in environmental issues and solutions, such as the transition to renewable energy. New technologies spike my interest a lot and I like being aware of innovations in a whole lot of fields.
Hopefully I will have my thesis ready within a couple of months, and can give an update about some of the findings.
As part of my MSc research project on Early-Miocene paleodiversity shifts due to marine incursions in the Amazon basin, I recorded and photographed large numbers of palynomorphs. The database consists of a set of images (Teunissen van Manen, 2015a) that I took with my smartphone (bundled in pdfs for sharing purposes) and an Excel overview file (Teunissen van Manen, 2015b) where each of the entries is described. Some of the entries are well documented taxa (C’mon, who hasn’t heard of Zonocostites ramonae and Mauritidites franciscoi before?) while others are “types” that are not formally described – mainly because in Amazonian sediments new, unseen palynomorphs pop up all the time. Indeed, this was the reason why I started the database in the first place: I was merely trying to keep up with the vast diversity that I encountered during sample counting.
Mauritidites franciscoi
TP 100
Seeing the added value of having a digital record of the palynological diversity from the Amazon basin samples, my project supervisor, Carina Hoorn (UvA), encouraged me to publish the database online so others could also access it. I’d like to invite you to take a look. I hope it can maybe help you with identifying taxa or, who knows, linking taxa across the Amazon basin… if you do, please let me know!
…or maybe it will have you rejoice in the huge diversity and alien beauty of pollen morphology, just as it rejoiced me as I was working through my (seemingly endless) samples.
Ecology of the past 