Aaron R Wood

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Managing Director at Iowa State University

Fossils of an insectivorous bat from the early Miocene of Panama are described as a new genus and species, Americanycteris cyrtodon (Chiroptera: Phyllostomidae: Phyllostominae). Americanycteris is a large phyllostomine bat, similar in size to the living species Chrotopterus auritus. Americanycteris cyrtodon can be distinguished from other closely r...

TouchTerrain is a simple-to-use web application that makes creating 3D printable terrain models from anywhere on the globe accessible to a wide range of users, from people with no GIS expertise to power users. For coders, a Python-based standalone version is available from the open-source project’s GitHub repository. Analyzing 18 months of web anal...

Herein, we describe a new early Miocene dugongine from marine deposits of the Culebra Cut (Gaillard Cut) of the Panama Canal. The new taxon, Culebratherium alemani, gen. et sp. nov., represents one of the few records of late Aquitanian–early Burdigalian sirenians and the oldest sirenian from Central America. A phylogenetic analysis places Culebrath...

Premise of the Study The global climate during the early Miocene was warmer than the present and preceded the even warmer middle Miocene climatic optimum. The paleo‐CO2 records for this interval suggest paradoxically low concentrations (<450 ppm) that are difficult to reconcile with a warmer‐than‐present global climate. Methods In this study, we u...

The late Miocene was an important time to understand the geological, climatic, and biotic evolution of the ancient New World tropics and the context for the Great American Biotic Interchange (GABI). Despite this importance, upper Miocene deposits containing diverse faunas and floras and their associated geological context are rare in Central Americ...

Panama REE (rare earth element) data analyzed in? 2015. (XLSX)

Analysis and comparisons of fossil woods studied. (XLSX)

New World monkeys (platyrrhines) are a diverse part of modern tropical ecosystems in North and South America, yet their early evolutionary history in the tropics is largely unknown. Molecular divergence estimates suggest that primates arrived in tropical Central America, the southern-most extent of the North American landmass, with several dispersa...

We describe fossil kogiid periotics from the Lower Pliocene upper Bone Valley Formation in central Florida and the Lower to Upper Pliocene Yorktown Formation at Lee Creek Mine, North Carolina. The fossils show diagnostic characters that identify them as belonging to Kogiidae, such as three spines in the anterior process, presence of an incudal proc...

The NSF-funded PCP PIRE (Panama Canal Project – Partnerships in International Research and Education) recently concluded a 6 year, multi-disciplinary geological and paleontological research program taking advantage of the new rock outcrops exposed during the expansion of the Panama Canal. The main goal of the project was to document and research Pa...

Kogiids are known by two living species, the pygmy and dwarf sperm whale (Kogia breviceps and K. sima). Both are relatively rare, and as their names suggest, they are closely related to the sperm whale, all being characterized by the presence of a spermaceti organ. However, this organ is much reduced in kogiids and may have become functionally diff...

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The shoaling and closure of the Central American Seaway (CAS) during the late Neogene had a major impact on local ecosystems, oceanographic currents, and global climate. Constraining the spatial and temporal context of CAS shoaling, however, is hindered by ambiguity in the stratigraphic relationships and depositional environments of marine sediment...

New excavations along the Panama Canal have yielded a growing Early Miocene assemblage of mammals referred to as the Centenario Fauna. Despite the area’s proximity to South America, the mammals of the Centenario Fauna have entirely North American affinities. The Centenario Fauna is distributed throughout a ∼115-m stratigraphic interval encompassing...

The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a brief period of significant global climate change that occurred ~56 Ma, with an increase in global temperatures of ~5-10° C. Among the biotic effects documented during the PETM, one of the most dramatic has been dwarfing of several mammalian lineages that subsequently increased in size during the co...

Understanding the temporospatial distribution of paleoenvironments in the Panama Canal Basin is necessary to unravel the tectonic evolution of the Isthmus of Panama, especially in light of new evidence for early closure of the Central American Seaway. The La Boca Formation of the Gaillard Cut, Panama Canal, was originally defined as early Miocene m...

Body size plays a critical role in mammalian ecology and physiology. Previous research has shown that many mammals became smaller during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), but the timing and magnitude of that change relative to climate change have been unclear. A high-resolution record of continental climate and equid body size change sho...

The Cucaracha Formation (early Miocene, 18.8 Ma (B. MacFadden, pers. comm., Oct. 2012) of the Panama Canal Basin preserves a rare record of terrestrial neotropical paleoenvironments and is important in understanding the history of biotic interchange between North and South America in the geologic past. We describe a new assemblage of freshwater mol...

Eocene archaeocete whales gave rise to all modern toothed and baleen whales (Odontoceti and Mysticeti) during or near the Eocene-Oligocene transition. Odontocetes have asymmetrical skulls, with asymmetry linked to high-frequency sound production and echolocation. Mysticetes are generally assumed to have symmetrical skulls and lack high-frequency he...

A nearly complete skeleton of Hyracotherium grangeri is described from the early Wasatchian (early Eocene) of the Clarks Fork Basin in northwestern Wyoming. This specimen includes a virtually complete, well-preserved pre-caudal vertebral column allowing the first thorough investigation of the locomotory abilities of these early Eocene horses. The p...

The mammalian mandible is a developmentally modular but functionally integrated system. Whether morphological integration can evolve to match the optimal pattern of functional integration may depend on the developmental origin of integration, specifically, on the role that direct epigenetic interactions play in shaping integration. These interactio...

The early Eocene equid Hyracotherium, the first North American horse, is an ideal taxon for investigating links between mammalian evolution and climatic/environmental change due its dense fossil record and the high-resolution stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental framework developed in the Clarks Fork and Bighorn Basins. Documentation of dental and...

Summary Several models explain how a complex integrated system like the rodent mandible can arise from multiple developmental modules. The models propose various integrating mechanisms, including epigenetic effects of muscles on bones. We test five for their ability to predict correlations found in the individual (symmetric) and fluctuating asymmet...

A nearly complete skeleton of Hyracotherium grangeri (UM 115547) was found in 2007 at the University of Michigan early Wasatchian (Wa-1) locality SC-16 in the northwestern Bighorn Basin, Wyoming. The skeleton has a vertebral formula of 7 cervical, 17 thoracic (T), 7 lumbar (L), 6 sacral, and 2+ caudal vertebrae with well preserved processes and zyg...

Downslope fossil contamination is the result of erosion and subsequent redeposition of fossil material onto lower stratigraphic horizons. This produces time-averaged and potentially anomalous faunal records. Here, we describe vertebrate concentrations in Bighorn Basin (Wyoming) conglomerates that are early Wasatchian (earliest Eocene) in age (Wa-1)...

Evolutionary stasis has often been explained by stabilizing selection, intrinsic constraints, or, more recently, by spatially patterned population dynamics. To distinguish which of these mechanisms explains a given case of stasis in the fossil record, stasis must first be rigorously documented in a high-resolution stratigraphic time series of fossi...