Science Seminar - Fossilised Fish

When:: 04:00pm - 05:00pm, Thursday, 27 September 2012
Where:: Biodiversity Conservation Centre - Kings Park, West Perth

The Science Seminars are held for the benefit of Authority staff and students throughout the year. All are very welcome to attend, including interested members of the public.

For further enquiries, please contact the Science administration officer.

Computerised tomography and the sex life of fossil fish from the north west of Western Australia
Speaker	Assoc Prof Kate Trinajstic, Curtin University
Duration	The presentation and question time will run for approximately one hour.
Abstract	The Kimberley of Western Australia preserves Australia’s Great Devonian Reef – a 380 million year old structure, where some of the best fossils the world has known are found. Placoderms – ancient armored fish once swam in this tropical reef and their fossils have revealed some remarkable surprises including the presence of several perfectly preserved embryos, one with an umbilical cord still attached indicating these primitive fish gave birth to live young. Although these discoveries are fascinating by themselves, what is probably not at first apparent is that an umbilical cord is made up of delicate soft tissue and so by all accounts should not fossilize. New technologies such as computerised microtomography are allowing us to determine that these old wisdoms do not always ring true. We can now CT scan our fossils without having to first prepare them in acid and this is revealing that soft tissue preservation is not as rare as once thought. Sites with exceptional preservation such as the Kimberley reefs continue to challenge researchers. Often morphological structures appear in animals from these faunas which have never been preserved in fishes from other sites leaving us with the conundrum of 'spare bones'. But discoveries such as these and the advent of computerised tomography (CT scanning) are providing the tools to unravel the past giving us an intimate glimpse into life in a lost world.
Presenter Bio	Associate Professor Kate Trinajstic is a QEII Research Fellow at Curtin University working on reconstructing the lost soft anatomy of the earliest vertebrates through ultra-high resolution synchrotron scanning and also holds and honorary position at the Western Australian Museum in Perth. She has recently been awarded the Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year, one of the prestigious Prime Minister's Prizes, for Science for her work investigating and interpreting soft tissues preserved in fossil fish. She obtained her PhD from the School of Earth and Environment UWA in 2000 and a Curtin Research Fellowship in 2009 to continue working on the fossils of Western Australia’s Kimberley region. A main research focus has been using new technologies such as micro-CT scanning to study the relationship between development and evolution, and the origin of major groups of animals. Research into the reproductive strategies of early vertebrates and the discovery of fossil embryos had important implications for our understanding of the evolution of live-bearing in vertebrates and presented the earliest evidence of viviparity within jawed vertebrates. This work was internationally recognized with the discovery being awarded as one of the Top 10 Species Discoveries for 2009.