Dr. Carole Gee, Senior Research Associate in Paleobotany, Universität Bonn, Germany

My research:

I am a paleobotanist, which means that I study fossil plants. Although I have worked on many kinds of fossil plants, my focus these days is on species such as Monkey-puzzle trees (Araucaria), Horsetails (Equisetum), and various ferns from the mid-Mesozoic, during the heyday of the giant sauropod dinosaurs. In fact, my latest research work concentrates on this very topic—the relationship between Jurassic plants and plant-eating dinosaurs. What did those giant sauropods eat anyway? Where there particular kinds of plants that they liked best? Were some better to eat or more nutritious than others? Did eating certain plant groups help the sauropods to develop (evolutionarily) their superlative sizes? To answer these questions as well as many more on the paleobiology and gigantism of the sauropod dinosaurs, I am working together with a number of scientists from a variety of fields in a 10-university consortium in Germany. You can check out our webpage at http://www.sauropod-dinosaurs.uni-bonn.de/.

Working with the CMC Collections:

The CMC Collections hold a number of skeletons and bones of giant sauropod dinosaurs, which were collected during various expeditions by Museum Director Glenn Storrs and other dinosaur hunters. They often collect fossil plant remains, too, when they find them. I came to Cincinnati to look at these fossil plant specimens, to see if I could tell what kinds of plants grew at the same place and at the same time as the different dinosaurs in the CMC collections. After a few hours of rummaging around in drawers, I found some nice fossilized wood, but there were few fossil leaves. This was disappointing, but the CMC Collections will be lending me some rock samples taken from near the dinosaur bones for “destructive sampling,” which means that I will pulverize them, mechanically and chemically, in the lab to look for fossil pollen and spores. This may tell me more about the ancient vegetation in which the sauropod dinosaurs lived and which plants they dined on.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008