Clément Jauvion

• PhD
• PhD Student at Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle

Le registre fossile est incomplet et ne rend pas réellement compte de la biodiversité ancienne. Certains gisements à préservation exceptionnelle sont riches en organismes « mous » rarement fossilisés. La tomographie à rayons X a révélé des structures biologiques remarquables (oeufs, organes internes) nous permettant, par exemple, de reconstituer de...

Fossils, including those that occasionally preserve decay-prone soft tissues, are mostly made of minerals. Accessing their chemical composition provides unique insight into their past biology and/or the mechanisms by which they preserve, leading to a series of developments in chemical and elemental imaging. However, the mineral composition of fossi...

The Solnhofen Konservat‐Lagerstätte yields a great number of remarkably preserved fossils of eumalacostracan crustaceans that help us understand the early radiation of several groups with modern representatives. One fossil from there, Francocaris grimmi Broili, 1917 is a small shrimp‐like crustacean originally described about 100 years ago as a mys...

Paleontologists have always tested, used and developed cutting edge imaging techniques to produce the most complete and accurate descriptions of their fossils. Nowadays, efforts are largely driven by taphonomic studies, especially those investigating the exceptional preservation of organic molecules or soft tissues, leading to a series of developme...

Crustacean eggs are rare in the fossil record. Here we report the exquisite preservation of a fossil polychelidan embedded within an unbroken nodule from the Middle Jurassic La Voulte-sur-Rhône Lagerstätte (France) and found with hundreds of eggs attached to the pleon. This specimen belongs to a new species, Palaeopolycheles nantosueltae sp. nov. a...

Konservat‐Lagerstätten are seen as snapshots of past biodiversity for a given location and time. However, processes leading to the exceptional morphological preservation of fossils in these deposits remain incompletely understood. This results in a deficient assessment of taphonomic biases and limits the robustness/relevance of palaeobiological rec...

The biogenicity of most of the putative Archean organic-walled microfossils discussed in the literature remains debated. Here, we report morphological and geochemical characterizations of an assemblage of microfossils isolated from the 3.46 Gyr-old Strelley Pool Formation (Western Australia), thereby providing a new set of data on the oldest authen...

Exceptionally preserved specimens yield critical information about the soft-part anatomy and the evolution of organisms through time. We compiled the first global dataset of exceptionally preserved muscles in malacostracans consisting of 47 occurrences, including 18 new records, predominantly preserved in Mesozoic Konservat-Lagerstätten (>70% of oc...

Exceptional and extremely rare preservation of soft parts, eyes, or syn-vivo associations provide crucial palaeoecological information on fossil-rich deposits. Here we present exceptionally preserved specimens of the polychelidan lobster Voulteryon parvulus, from the Jurassic of La Voulte-sur-Rhône Fossil-Lagerstätte, France, bearing eyes with hexa...

Teredinidae are obligate xylophagous bivalves that colonize drift wood. They display a highly derived anatomy with a reduced shell; most of their body consists of soft tissues. Consequently, fossil teredinids mostly correspond to burrows, shells or small terminal aragonite structures called ‘pallets’. We report, from mid-Cretaceous logs of the Envi...

The development of X‐ray tomography in the last decade has led to a revolution in palaeontology by providing a means of imaging 3D fossils. In turn, imaging of flat fossils has strongly benefitted from critical improvement of synchrotron X‐ray fluorescence (XRF). The latter, which allows the mapping of 2D distributions of major‐to‐trace elements ov...

The Middle Jurassic La Voulte-sur-Rhône Lagerstätte yields fossils with remarkable morphological details. Those depict a highly diversified bathyal palaeocommunity dominated by arthropods. Amongst them, shrimps are very abundant. We hereby redescribe the two most abundant species of shrimps (Dendrobranchiata, Penaeoidea), Aeger brevirostris Van Str...

Poster presented at the Goldschmidt 2017 conference

The La Voulte Konservat-Lagerstätte is an exceptional renown site from the Callovian (Jurassic). Its exceptional fine detail preservation – in 3D sideritic nodules – yields various fossils, including crustaceans. X-ray microtomography (XTM) was applied to an exceptionally well-preserved specimen of a polychelidan lobster to investigate its external...

Les Polychelida (Décapodes) sont de curieux crustacés fossiles qui ont été découverts dans le registre fossilifère, dans des gisements à conservation exceptionnelle (Konservat-Lagerstätten), bien avant d’être découverts en milieu marin profond. Les espèces fossiles de Polychelida (principalement jurassiques) diffèrent nettement des espèces actuelle...