EVOLUTIONS Internships 2018

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.

I spend most of my time in the lab observing the different projects going on and taking pictures on the different microscopes. I've gotten better at imaging cellulose fibers and nanotubes, although taking measurements and collecting data seems to be the most difficult part. There is a lot of data analysis involved in the projects here at CRISP. For my project, high surface and low surface nanotubes must be prepared for inspection under the microscope and two different concentrations of the nanotubes will be used. First is the threshold concentration (21mM), this is the concentration where you can begin to observe the formation of nanotubes; the second concentration (270 mM) is the medicinal concentration. In order to form the nanotubes, a powder must be combined with water (specific measurements coming soon). The solution must be stored overnight and then it will be placed on a grid for inspection under transmission electron microscope (TEM). Most of the process involves the prep...

      While participating in the CRISP (Center for Research on Interface Structures and Phenomena) and using the IMP-MS to characterize element composition, find the number of particles, find the size of nano-particles, distribute size of nano-particles and analyze single nano-particles I have learned a collection of procedures and processes for handling the instrument. For instance, when diluting a solution to a lower concentration, it could be easily analyzed in the ICP-MS. The method for diluting a solution involves: "20,000ppb" 1) Use micro-pipette to take  0.1mL of stock solution (Iron Sucrose) and place it in a 100ml volumetric flask. 2) Use micro-pipette to take 99.9mL of deionized water and mix it with the 0.1mL of stock solution in the volumetric flask. 3) Pour the 99.9mL of deionized water and 0.1mL of stock solution mix into a vile 4) label the vile "20,000ppb". 5) Place "20,000ppb" in sonicator until grabbing it to be ready for th...

The processes, tasks, and procedures that I do for my internship is first to digitize not only vertebrae but also invertebrate fossils. The reason on why we digitize fossils is so that it could go on a website (idigpaleo) where paleontologist all over the world could be able to access the types of fossils that are inside the Peabody rather than them having to come all the way over here. How we digitize the fossils is placing them on a black screen where we kind play around on how we want the fossils to look like when we take the picture. Once we are satisfied with how we placed the fossils then we would start taking pictures from a device that takes it for us using a program on a computer. The camera doesn't just one picture but takes multiple. Once the pictures are taken we render all the photos into one photo that would soon go onto the website (idigpaleo).  Another task that I do is cataloging. Now cataloging is so that all of the fossils are inside of a system where it would ...