A Rourkela-born scientist in an American university has identified fossils that may be as old as 400 million years through a technique that can benefit other researchers.
The techniques he has developed and used for identifying fossils so old can also be used to help identify extinct species and enable scientists understand the natural and human causes behind the crises in the biodiversity sphere and the collapse of ecosystem, says Rituparna Bose, who is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the City University of New York.
According to 33-year-old Bose, she used geometric morphometrics, a relatively new method for measuring the shape of organisms, to study the very subtle differences between species and to better understand how they changed with time. Her work dealt with the fossils found in Ohio and Michigan.
Usually, organisms that look different from one another are grouped differently. So, scientists were finding it difficult to measure the subtle differences between the species, particularly where no genetic or behavioural data are available.
A part of Bose’s work was presented at the North American Paleontological Convention (NAPC) and published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, India, as well as in the PalAontologische Zeitschrift, one of the oldest journals on fossil science.
Bose is the first Indian to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of the Geological Society. She is also a Fellow of the Society of Biology and the Royal Society of Entomology.
Her findings have come at a time when 2011-2020 has been declared as the UN Decade of Biodiversity. Her work was funded by the Theodore Roosevelt Grant awarded by the American Museum of Natural History and the Dunbar-Schuchert Grant of Yale University.