In the News
1/24/2022
Congratulations Mary L. Droser of @UCRiverside, winner of the 2022 @theNASciences in Early Earth and Life Sciences-Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal for her prominent role in advancing understanding of the Ediacaran and Paleozoic life and environment!
10/25/2021
Rachel Surprenant, a second year PhD student in the Droser Lab, was awarded the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship for her proposal "Leveraging regional and global records of Ediacaran tubular taxa to pinpoint the nature and dynamics of metazoan success at the dawn of animal life".
The abstract for the research project can be found on page ten of the award announcement (link below). Rachel's proposal was one of 32 national selections made by NASA's Planetary Science division in 2021.
3/19/2021
A paper written by Droser lab alumnus, Scott Evans, alongside Mary Droser and Doug Erwin, of the American Museum of Natural History, was recently published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The paper details the known fossil evidence for developmental processes in Ediacara macrofossils and what these developmental processes indicate about the placement of the Ediacara Biota within the tree of life.
This paper received an exciting amount of attention in the press, from a UC Riverside press release to an article in popular mechanics!
Figure 1 from Evans et al. 2021
"Holozoan phylogeny with inferred placement of representative White Sea taxa (dashed boxes) based on developmentally relevant characters (1–5, black box)."
6/16/2020
Mary Droser was awarded the 2019-20 Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentor Award by the Graduate Division and Academic Senate of UCR.
5/2020
Recent Droser Lab alumnus Scott Evans was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from The Agouron Institute to conduct research at Virginia Tech with Shuhai Xiao.
3/23/2020
Former Droser Lab member Scott Evans and others published a paper in PNAS identifying the first bilaterian in the fossil record from the Nilpena Station National Heritage Ediacara Fossil Site in South Australia.
1/13/2020
Rachel Surprenant and Phil Boan held a fundraiser to raise money for those affected by the South Australia wildfires.
8/22/2019
Mary Droser was awarded the 2019 Moore Medal in Paleontology by the Society for Sedimentary Geology.
9/2019
Bridget Kelly, a current PhD student in the Droser Lab, was selected to serve as a Student Representative for the Paleontological Society.
7/23/2019
"Australian officials signed an agreement last night allowing UC Riverside to continue its pioneering research on a government-owned goldmine for unusual fossils."
6/23/2019
UC Riverside hosts the 2019 North American Paleontology Convention, led by Mary Droser and Nigel Hughes
