EVOLUTIONS Internships 2018

When coming into the program, something that I hoped to learn was how to carry out a research project, earn about the application of the research and its importance to education. My expectation is the same to an extent from what I learned since I learned about the implementation of the study in the real world and why it's essential. However, I still struggle to understand how to fully carry out a research project since, the project that I was assigned regarded little data analysis. Even though, the project that I was assigned provided little data analysis; it had a strong background in information. Finally, I got the chance to not only focus on my project but also the projects that individuals within the program were doing as well. The most challenging aspects of my research experience did not have the chance to focus on a specific problem or question. When we did try to focus on a particular issue or question it was deemed not necessary or not useful so, there was no funding

     At this point in time, my internship has been over for about a week and I am planning what I want to include on my poster. I have been brainstorming ideas of possible research questions that could apply to what I did during my internship, but this is proving to be a difficult task because most of the work I did revolved around cataloging outflows rather than actually exploring a question. So far, I have been able to come up with my methods and procedures and some of the basic information that I want to include on my poster about outflows and star formation. I also have results for my research in the sense that I have different types of images of various outflows in the Orion Nebula to showcase on my poster. However, I do not have results that exactly answer any specific research question at this point.      Throughout my internship, I learned things such as what star formation is and what happens during it, how to look for outflows, how to use various computer programs such Glue,

The procedures that we do in the lab are mostly to record and document that we have the actual fossils. The procedures that we learned were taking stack photos, 3D scanning, labeling fossils, cataloging fossils, rehousing them, and putting them away. Stack photos seem complicated when you first try it, but it is not as hard as it seems. First you take a picture with a color key and scale by themselves to show which lighting and scales you used. Then you place the object you want to photograph along with the scale. Zoom in with the camera to get the object in frame. You then have to find the highest point on the fossil, which you do by just looking at them and finding the topmost piece. You select that point and focus the camera so the highest point is clearly in focus. Set that as the start point and focus the camera until it is slightly out of focus. Set that at the end point and run the scan. You will get a bunch of pictures saved in your files. Drag them all into a peogram (I do no

Our lab is very confusing to do a project on due to it being a collection. There isn’t a set question that we are looking to answer, we are mostly just documenting and taking care of fossils. We haven’t quite decided what the project will be about, but we may create a question related to the collection, such as, “Why are there so many mosasaur fossils in the Western Interior Seaway collection compared to other species?”. We learned many things about rocks. We learned about the different types of faults and categorizing diffirent unconformities within rocks. We also learned that the Western Interior Seaway was actually an ocean that was surrounded by land when the tide lowered. There is also much more, but there isn’t enough space to write it all.

The research I am doing this summer is not what I expected. I expected the research to be monotonous and repetetive, which is what paleontology and lab work is often shown to be. It is actually very interesting to me, and is much more involved than I thought. Our supervisors (I think that’s the best term) are also much cooler than I thought they would be. I find the geology aspect of the research very interesting. I didn’t realize that paleontology and geology were so closely related, and that they relied on each other so much. I also did not know that there were so many ways to classify rocks and learn about the Earth through them. It is surprising how rocks can show us just how small we really are.

This is the third day of training. I learned a lot about my internship today. Our project is about the collections, ecology, and food webs in the Western Interior Seaway (WIS). This includes many organisms, including ancient "sea monsters", microorganisms, invertebrates, and echinoderms. This displays a large portion of the ecosystem at the time, and shows the diversity in the ecosystem. This also ties in with invertebrate paleontology, the main focus of the internship, because it displays how they interacted with other organisms and their lifestyle. I am looking forward to seeing fossils and understanding how organisms survived and lived with the amount of diversity in the WIS. I am nervous about the amount of research we have to do because of the amount of organisms and diversity in the WIS.