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Publications (55)
When a volcano erupts, it is often associated with destruction, particularly damage to infrastructure and loss of life. But these natural events also offer unexpected research opportunities, leading to serendipitous discoveries. This was the case for the volcanic events that made the headlines during 19 September to 25 December 2021, on the Canaria...
Black mass is the industry term applied to end-of-life (EoL) lithium-ion batteries that have been mechanically processed for potential use as a recycled material to recover the valuable metals present, including cobalt, lithium, manganese, nickel and copper. A significant challenge to the effective processing of black mass is the complexity of the...
High-value applications, such as adsorbents, have drawn attention to geopolymers. In several of those applications, having the geopolymer as porous spherical particles is beneficial. This study presents a novel process for fabricating porous metakaolin-based geopolymer granules using a combination of direct foaming, one-part alkali activation, and...
The South African Early Jurassic morganucodontan Erythrotherium is considered by some authors to be potentially
synonymous with Morganucodon, due to similar tooth morphology. However, despite their similar dental morphology,
the occlusal pattern of Erythrotherium parringtoni has been described as embrasure occlusion, close to the mode of
Megazos...
“Black mass” is the industry term used to describe a type of e-waste comprising crushed and shredded battery cells. It is an intermediate product in the recycling of spent, end-of-life, batteries. It comprises a mixture of metals including; lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel, which are valuable recycling commodities, of increasing strategic and...
Sulfidic mine tailings are potential waste materials from mining and mineral processing, and they can contain a high content of sulfur and metal(loid)s, even after bioleaching. Due to the large amount of tailings waste from historical mining, it is crucial to find alternative methods for utilizing such waste rather than permanent storage in tailing...
Ptch receptors 1 and 2 mediate Hedgehog signaling pivotal for organ development and homeostasis. In contrast to embryonic lethal Ptch1 −/− phenotype, Ptch2 −/− mice display no effect on gross phenotype. In this brief report, we provide evidence of changes in the putative incisor mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) niches that contribute to accelerated inci...
We suggest that mammalian endothermy was established amongst Middle Jurassic crown mammals, through reviewing state‐of‐the‐art fossil and living mammal studies. This is considerably later than the prevailing paradigm, and has important ramifications for the causes, pattern, and pace of physiological evolution amongst synapsids. Most hypotheses argu...
Tooth enamel and dentin are the most studied hard tissues used to explore hominin evolution, life history, diet, health, and culture. Surprisingly, cementum (the interface between the alveolar bone and the root dentin) remains the least studied dental tissue even though its unique growth, which is continuous throughout life, has been acknowledged s...
Cementum, the tissue attaching mammal tooth roots to the periodontal ligament, grows appositionally throughout life, displaying a series of circum-annual incremental features. These have been studied for decades as a direct record of chronological lifespan. The majority of previous studies on cementum have used traditional thin-section histological...
Palaenigma wrangeli (Schmidt) is a finger-sized fossil with a tetraradiate conical skeleton; it occurs as a rare component in fossiliferous Upper Ordovician strata of the eastern Baltic Basin and is known exclusively from north Estonia. The systematic affinities and palaeoecology of P. wrangeli remained questionable. Here, the available specimens o...
Teeth act as tools for acquiring and processing food, thus holding a prominent role in vertebrate evolution. In mammals, dental-dietary adaptations rely on tooth complexity variations controlled by cusp number and pattern. Complexity increase through cusp addition has dominated the diversification of mammals. However, studies of Mammalia alone cann...
Geo‐inspiration explores the potential of naturally occurring earth materials as an inspiration for the creation, design and utilization of brand‐new materials and products. It draws on 4.5 billion years of earth history, over which time our planet has evolved significantly, with the formation of an ever‐increasing number of minerals. Through time...
Cementum, the tissue attaching mammal tooth roots to the periodontal ligament, grows appositionally throughout life, displaying a series of circum-annual incremental features. These have been studied for decades as a direct record of chronological lifespan. The majority of previous studies on cementum have used traditional thin-section histological...
Cementum is a mineralized dental tissue common to mammals that grows throughout life, following a seasonally appositional rhythm. Each year, one thick translucent increment and one thin opaque increment is deposited, offering a near-complete record of an animal's life history. Male and female mammals exhibit significant differences in oral health,...
Despite considerable advances in knowledge of the anatomy, ecology and evolution of early mammals, far less is known about their physiology. Evidence is contradictory concerning the timing and fossil groups in which mammalian endothermy arose. To determine the state of metabolic evolution in two of the earliest stem-mammals, the Early Jurassic Morg...
Teeth act as tools for acquiring and processing food and so hold a prominent role in vertebrate evolution. In mammals, dental-dietary adaptations rely on tooth shape and complexity variations controlled by cusp number and pattern - the main features of the tooth surface. Complexity increase through cusp addition has dominated the diversification of...
There is uncertainty regarding the timing and fossil species in which mammalian endothermy arose, with few studies of stem-mammals on key aspects of endothermy such as basal or maximum metabolic rates, or placing them in the context of living vertebrate metabolic ranges. Synchrotron X-ray imaging of incremental tooth cementum shows two Early Jurass...
A functional analysis of a well-preserved snout of the early-diverging mammaliaform Morganucodon watsoni, with matching upper and lower dentitions, and of the holotype of Megazostrodon rudnerae, showed that both taxa had a primarily orthal occlusal path. In Morganucodon, the direction was individually variable and either strictly orthal or slightly...
Stereoscopic microwear and 3D surface texture analyses on the cheek teeth of ten Upper Triassic to Lower Cretaceous tritylodontid (Mammaliamorpha) taxa of small/medium to large body size suggest that all were generalist feeders and none was a dietary specialist adapted to herbivory. There was no correspondence between body size and food choice. Ste...
S1 Table. Specimen details of the tritylodontid taxa analysed. Country codes refer to ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. Abbreviations: L, large-bodied; M, medium-bodied; pc, lower postcanine; PC, upper postcanine; S, small-bodied. Acronyms to museum collections: BRSUG: Geology Museum, University of Bristol, Bristol, GB; FMNH: Finnish Museum of Natural History, H...
S1 Fig. Examples of tooth morphology and wear facets in Tritylodontidae. (a) Skull of Oligokyphus sp. (MCZ 8843) in ventral view. This specimen was excluded from analysis because of postmortem alterations on the wear facets. (b) and (c) Wear facets (on high-resolution casts) of lower postcanines of Kayentatherium wellesi (MCZ 8811). In all three im...
S2 Table. ANOVA test results of tritylodontid species with N ≥ 2. Numerical parameters of stereoscopic microwear (small pits, large pits, fine scratches, and coarse scratches) and parameters of 3D surface texture (pit void volume, peak density, peak curvature, and dale area) are shown. Significant p-values are in bold.
S3 Table. PCA variances and loadings of the significant parameter variables for stereoscopic microwear and 3D surface texture. Abbreviations (as ordered in table): SP = small pits; LP = large pits; FS = fine scratches; CS = coarse scratches; Spd_rank = peak density (rank-transformed); Spc_rank = arithmetic mean peak curvature (rank-transformed); Sd...
S4 Table. Key characters of major, widely distributed, Mesozoic plant groups
The most mineralized tissue of the mammalian body is tooth enamel. Especially in species with thick enamel, three-dimensional (3D) tomography data has shown that the distribution of enamel varies across the occlusal surface of the tooth crown. Differences in enamel thickness among species and within the tooth crown have been used to examine taxonom...
Multituberculate mammals thrived during the Mesozoic, but their diversity declined from the mid-late Paleocene onwards, becoming extinct in the late Eocene. The radiation of superficially similar, eutherian rodents has been linked to multituberculate extinction through competitive exclusion. However, characteristics providing rodents with a suppose...
The most mineralized tissue of the mammalian body is tooth enamel. Especially in species with thick enamel, three-dimensional (3D) tomography data has shown that the distribution of enamel varies across the occlusal surface of the tooth crown. Differences in enamel thickness among species and within the tooth crown have been used to examine taxonom...
An increasing number of mammalian species have been shown to have a history of hybridization and introgression based on genetic analyses. Only relatively few fossils, however, preserve genetic material, and morphology must be used to identify the species and determine whether morphologically intermediate fossils could represent hybrids. Because den...
While most mammals have whiskers, some tactile specialists—mainly small, nocturnal, and arboreal species—can actively move their whiskers in a symmetrical, cyclic movement called whisking. Whisking enables mammals to rapidly, tactually scan their environment to efficiently guide locomotion and foraging in complex habitats. The muscle architecture t...
An increasing number of mammalian species have been shown to have a history of hybridization and introgression based on genetic analyses. Only relatively few fossils, however, preserve genetic material and morphology must be used to identify the species and determine whether morphologically intermediate fossils could represent hybrids. Because dent...
A digital cranial endocast of the specimen UFRGS-PV-596-T of Riograndia guaibensis was obtained from μCT scan images. This is a small cynodont, closely related to mammaliaforms, from the Late Triassic of Brazil. Riograndia has large olfactory bulb casts and the cerebral hemispheres region is relatively wider than in other non-mammaliaform cynodonts...
Tritylodontidae was a successful advanced cynodont clade with a close relationship to mammals, but falling outside the clade Mammaliaformes. Stereognathus ooliticus was the first tritylodontid to be named and described in 1854, but since then no comprehensive description for this species has been produced. A second species, S. hebridicus, was named...
Multituberculates were one of the most successful mammalian orders to have ever lived, persisting for at least 125 million years from the Middle Jurassic through the K-Pg mass extinction to the late Eocene. The cause of multituberculate extinction remains unresolved and has received minimal research attention for several decades. One widely accepte...
Rich, T.H., Hopson, J.A., Gill, P.G., Trusler, P., Rogers-Davidson, S., Morton, S., Cifelli, R.L., Pickering, D., Kool, L., Siu, K., Burgmann, F.A., Senden, T., Evans, A.R., Wagstaff, B.E., Seegets-Villiers, D., Corfe, I.J., Flannery, T.F., Walker, K., Musser, A.M., Archer, M., Pian, R. & Vickers-Rich, P., June 2016. The mandible and dentition of t...
We describe tritylodontid remains from the Lower Cretaceous Kuwajima Formation (Tetori Group) in central Japan as representing a new genus, Montirictus kuwajimaensis, gen. et sp. nov. Montirictus is a medium-sized tritylodontid genus characterized by upper cheek teeth having the cusp formula 2-2-2 with subequal cusps, buccal and lingual cusps retai...
The objective of this study was to visualise in a novel way morphological characteristics of bovine teats to gain a better understanding of the detailed teat morphology. We applied silicone casting and 3D digital imaging in order to obtain a more detailed image of the teat structures than that seen in previous studies. Teat samples from 65 dairy co...
The evolutionary relationships of extinct species are ascertained primarily through the analysis of morphological characters. Character inter-dependencies can have a substantial effect on evolutionary interpretations, but the developmental underpinnings of character inter-dependence remain obscure because experiments frequently do not provide detai...
We studied dental complexity in Laonastes aenigmamus to place this unique rodent
species into a comparative context. The complexity of cheek teeth of Laonastes are
within the range of that for omnivorous mammals feeding predominantly on plants or
that for herbivorous mammals. In a comparative sample of predominantly herbivorous
hystricomorph rodent...
Tritylodontids are small to medium-sized, mainly terrestrial synapsids, which ranged from the Late Triassic until late Early Cretaceous and are highly abundant in many localities. They possess several mammal-like characters of which their multi-rooted, multi-cusped molariform teeth with precise occlusion are the most remarkable. The combination of...
Genomes for three species of turtles were recently reported in Nature Genetics and Genome Biology. The findings of Wang et al. (2013) and Abramyan et al. (2013) place the turtles as a sister group to birds and crocodiles and offer clues to the origins of this group's remarkable physiological traits.
The Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago is conventionally thought to have been a turning point in mammalian evolution. Prior to that event and for the first two-thirds of their evolutionary history, mammals were mostly confined to roles as generalized, small-bodied, nocturnal insectivores, presumably under select...
On the basis of new information from the 10th specimen of Archaeopteryx, Mayr et al. (Reports, 2 December 2005, p. 1483) suggested that birds, or avian flight, originated twice. We investigate the statistical support for this phylogenetic hypothesis and show that it is no better supported by available morphological character data than the hypothesi...