The Great Amniote Ontogeny Project: Student Research in Evolutionary Biology — Presentation Detail — Celebration of Scholars

Instructions

Student presentations must have a faculty sponsor.

Abstracts must include a title and a description of the research, scholarship, or creative work. The description should be 150-225 words in length and constructed in a format or style appropriate for the presenter’s discipline.

The following points should be addressed within the selected format or style for the abstract:

A clear statement of the problem or question you pursued, or the scholarly goal or creative theme achieved in your work.
A brief comment about the significance or uniqueness of the work.
A clear description of the methods used to achieve the purpose or goals for the work.
A statement of the conclusions, results, outcomes, or recommendations, or if the work is still in progress, the results you expect to report at the event.

Presenter photographs should be head and shoulder shots comparable to passport photos.

Additional Information

More information is available at carthage.edu/celebration-scholars/. The following are members of the Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Committee who are eager to listen to ideas and answer questions:

Jun Wang
Kim Instenes
John Kirk
Nora Nickels
Andrew Pustina
James Ripley

The Great Amniote Ontogeny Project: Student Research in Evolutionary Biology

Name: Thomas Carr
Department: Natural Science
Type of research: Independent research
Funding: n/a

Abstract

The Great Amniote Ontogeny Project (GAOP) is an undergraduate initiative that includes students in the research program of Dr. Thomas Carr. The goal of the GAOP is to discover what evolutionary processes produced the diversity of amniotes (egg-laying backboned animals such as mammals and reptiles) that we see today and in the geological past. The basis of the GAOP is the reconstruction of growth series of individual species using cladistic analysis, an approach used to reconstruct evolutionary relationships between organisms. Since growth is also a hierarchically-ordered sequence of change, this method can be used to recover growth series of living and extinct organisms. The emphasis of the GAOP is the growth of dinosaurs, but modern organisms (e.g., Homo sapiens) have been included to expand the scope of the project. The GAOP includes Paleontology Track students, where they receive training in the method and produce original research, in an independent study setting. The GAOP serves as essential preparation and qualification for graduate school. So far, two student projects (Velociraptor, Pachyrhinosaurus) have been presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and a third has been completed (Allosaurus); several other projects are planned (e.g., crested duckbills, Stegoceras, Pinacosaurus, Ceratosaurus) for the next year. After the completion of growth series that are representative of each major dinosaur lineage, they will be compared quantitatively to identify the developmental processes that produced the evolutionary novelties (adaptations) that separate them.