Origin of jaws - the greatest unsolved mystery of early vertebrate evolution. The 2008 discovery of an unborn embryo in the 380 million-year-old "Mother Fish" from the famous Gogo fossil deposit in NW Australia has attracted a collaboration of Australian, American and Chinese scientists to a new international collaboration. The team will study spectacular new fossils from central Australia and southern China, the oldest known back-boned animals with jaws and a hard skeleton. Innovative 3D X-ray ....Origin of jaws - the greatest unsolved mystery of early vertebrate evolution. The 2008 discovery of an unborn embryo in the 380 million-year-old "Mother Fish" from the famous Gogo fossil deposit in NW Australia has attracted a collaboration of Australian, American and Chinese scientists to a new international collaboration. The team will study spectacular new fossils from central Australia and southern China, the oldest known back-boned animals with jaws and a hard skeleton. Innovative 3D X-ray computer tomography, and the Australian synchrotron, will be used to investigate ancient cells and preserved soft tissue structures, to search for evidence that copulation and internal fertilization, as in modern mammals, might have originated when jaws first evolved. Read moreRead less
Building Central Asia: Linking the Growth of Asia to its Exhumation. The consumption of the Tethys Ocean and the associated collision of Gondwana-derived terranes with Eurasia resulted in the uplift of the highest mountain belt on Earth: the Himalayas. However, stresses from this collision zone propagated far into the Eurasian interior by reactivating faults and creating mountain belts along these fault zones. This project aims to map and model how and when fault (re)activation occurred by integ ....Building Central Asia: Linking the Growth of Asia to its Exhumation. The consumption of the Tethys Ocean and the associated collision of Gondwana-derived terranes with Eurasia resulted in the uplift of the highest mountain belt on Earth: the Himalayas. However, stresses from this collision zone propagated far into the Eurasian interior by reactivating faults and creating mountain belts along these fault zones. This project aims to map and model how and when fault (re)activation occurred by integrating multi-method thermochronological and structural data on major Meso-Cenozoic Central Asian fault systems. The resulting time-integrated tectonic model will aid in the understanding of the India-Eurasia collision, the building of the mountainous Central Asian landscape and its influence on the Asian climate.Read moreRead less