Mary Droser

As the world churns — a history of ecosystem engineering in the oceans

tomwt — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 22:43:51 +0000

As the world churns — a history of ecosystem engineering in the oceans tomwt Mon, 08/11/2025 - 15:43 More CNAS in the Media Jim Shelton | Yale News August 11, 2025

YALE - The murky world at the bottom of the oceans is now a little clearer, thanks to a new study that tracks the evolution of marine sediment layers across hundreds of millions of years.

It is a story of world-building on a grand, yet granular, scale, accomplished by a succession of marine animals that burrowed and tunneled their way through heat and cold, species expansions and mass die-offs. Scientists call the process bioturbation — the excavation and mixing of sediments and soils by burrowing animals, particularly for shelter and sustenance.

“Bioturbation is one of the most important forms of ecosystem engineering today, both in the oceans and on land,” said Lidya Tarhan, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study published in the journal Science Advances.

...

Kate Pippenger, a graduate student in Tarhan’s lab at Yale, is co-author of the study. Additional co-authors are Alison Cribb of the University of Southampton, Michelle Zill and David Bottjer of the University of Southern California, William Phelps of Riverside Community College, Mary Droser of the University of California-Riverside, and Matthew Clapham of the University of California-Santa Cruz.

The research was funded by Yale and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.

Read the Full Article

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

National Academy of Sciences elects members and international members

tomwt — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:32:49 +0000

National Academy of Sciences elects members and international members tomwt Wed, 04/30/2025 - 08:32 More CNAS in the Media Molly Galvin | National Academy of Sciences April 29, 2025

NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES - The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 120 members and 30 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,662 and the total number of international members to 556. International members are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States.

Newly elected members of the UC Riverside College of Natural & Agricultural Sciences and their affiliations at the time of election are:

Mary L. Droser: Professor and department chair, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside

Hailing Jin: Professor and plant molecular geneticist biology and Cy Mouradick Endowed Chair, Department of Microbiology and Plant Pathology, University of California, Riverside

Read the Full Story

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

Department of Microbiology & Plant Pathology

Hailing Jin

With a Little Bit of Luck: What Mary Droser has Uncovered after a Few Million Years

owenw — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:11:43 +0000

With a Little Bit of Luck: What Mary Droser has Uncovered after a Few Million Years owenw Mon, 01/27/2025 - 12:11 More College News January 27, 2025

Mary Droser, Distinguished Professor of Geology in the UC Riverside Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, likes to say that she is the luckiest and most privileged person she knows.

To anyone considering her prodigious list of professional accomplishments, the eponymous head of the Droser Paleoecology Lab on campus certainly seems to have had a long, favored run in the field of paleontology; the crowning achievement being her indispensable participation in the creation of Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia.

Nestled on the western fringes of the Flinders Ranges, Nilpena spans over 60,617 hectares of diverse landscapes, and encompasses the grounds of the former Nilpena Pastoral Station. Australian pastoral ranches – or stations – are typically large land holdings used to raise livestock.

“It’s the most fun and exciting thing that’s happened to me,” Professor Droser says. “That park is based on the work of me and my graduate students over many years. I brought a bunch of people over for the opening, including my husband, who had been there only once for about an hour, my kids, who had always been involved in the research, and many grad students. It was just an extraordinary moment...I would say I’m really lucky.”

On February 5, Professor Droser will kick off the 2025 Science Lecture Series with the talk, "Animals, Sediments, Slime, Muck and Goo: The Record of Earth’s Early Animals and Their Environments with Implications for Discovering Life Elsewhere."

Professor Mary Droser

“I’m going to talk about the Ediacara Biota, the oldest record of animals on the planet,” she says. “It’s what my research has been on for decades in Nilpena. We’re looking for life on other planets, but despite all the discoveries of exoplanets, only one planet is known to harbor life, and that’s us. The amazing thing is that we have a phenomenal record of the unfolding of life on Earth.

“I study and will talk about the unfolding of animal life,” she continues, “the dawn of animal life on Earth – long before dinosaurs. This is what we call the Ediacara Biota. It’s a suite of soft-bodied organisms, things like jellyfish and sea anemones...no mineralized skeletons.”

According to Professor Droser, a handful of the Ediacara Biota organisms gave rise to the animal diversity we see today. “That’s what a lot of my last 20 years of research has been about,” she says, work that encompasses the fossils uncovered in Nilpena.

Droser’s interest in paleontology began when she was a small child floating around Shelter Island at the eastern end of Long Island on an inner tube with a snorkel and mask, looking at the bottom of the sea floor.

“That’s kind of what I do today in the Ediacara,” she says. “We have preserved sea floors, but, yeah, that was instrumental in how I got interested in paleontology. When I was five, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was 10, I got drawn in by geology...and paleontology is, of course, the combination of those two things.”

Professor Droser counts herself as the rare person that didn’t enter the field through an interest in dinosaurs - she was geology major. “I was incredibly lucky to have had those interests as a kid, she says. "I still go every summer and wander the tidal flats in Shelter Island and look for things.

“I suppose I could have gone into marine biology,” she continues, “but the kinds of things we do on the Ediacara Biota, we are essentially asking the same questions because we are looking at things that are preserved in situ, in the places where they lived. We have all these snapshots of the sea floor. It’s literally equivalent, minus the snorkel and mask. I never really gave it up!”

In 1989, shortly after completing her dissertation on when organisms first started burrowing into the sediment, Professor Droser arrived at UC Riverside. Not too long afterwards, thanks to a colleague who hailed from South Australia, she visited the Flinders Range for the first time, and a whole new world opened up. “It was like Dorothy opening the door to Oz, but Oz in a good way, not scary Oz,” she says. “We knew we had something very special that needed to be preserved.”

Professor Droser says that fossils had been discovered at the station, but had not really been looked at exhaustively. After a talk with the landowners, Ross and Jane Farghar (who Professor Droser considers family), they were given clearance to excavate and turn over whole beds of the fossilized sea floor.

“I had a grant for two years. At the time, my kids were in diapers and came with me,” she says. “They are both now in graduate school. Those two years turned into 25 years. We never really left because once we started doing this, it became this extraordinary record and we’ve been able to excavate now 40 beds and have discovered all sorts of amazing things about the early history of animals on planet Earth. There is no place else like it, and it should be celebrated.”

Over the years, Professor Droser has introduced Nilpena Ediacara National Park to various VIPS, including Kathryn Uhrich, former Dean of CNAS, and Chancellor Kim Wilcox. “This campus, this department, and this college have always allowed me to pursue these interests, and I’ve been incredibly lucky with graduate students and the way they’ve excelled at UCR,” Professor Droser says. “They’ve all gone on to academic jobs...some still work in South Australia, and that speaks to the support of UCR.”

In 2008, Droser discovered the fossil Funisia dorothea on the Flinders Range, and named it after her mother, Dorothy. Funisia was hailed as the first known species to sexually reproduce. “My mom had just retired from a New York City law firm and with my kids still in diapers, she came to Australia every summer and watched over them,” Professor Droser says. “We would go for months with no wi-fi, cell coverage or T.V. in the middle of the Outback. So she certainly deserved at least a fossil named after her...that was an easy one!”

Eight years later Professor Droser named a 550-million-year-old fossil Obamus, after President Barack Obama. The fossil has been reconstructed in 3D and 2D paper drawings, and is part of the Obama Presidential Library. “I heard from the Obama Foundation that they wanted to include it,” she says. "That’s a long process, actually...we wanted to acknowledge Obama’s contributions to science and his enthusiasm for science. It was the right thing for us to do.”

Professor Droser is currently part of team acting on behalf of the Government of South Australia and the traditional owners of the Flinders Rangers, the Adnyamathanha people, to nominate the Ranges as a World Heritage Site. She says that the nomination will be submitted to UNESCO in September of this year for a vote in 2026.

“We’re in good shape, but working very hard,” Prof. Droser says. “We’ve expanded the bid to not just include Nilpena, because there are some other really amazing places in the area that can be helpful in telling the story of the dawn of animal life. I’m in the right place at the right time with a government that gets it, and I'm happy to lean in and help people understand that there is no place like this anywhere in the world, and it should be celebrated.”

Professor Droser teaches a course at UC Riverside called “Headlines in the History of Life” (GEO 003). “We have all this science fiction about monsters, and all you have to do is look at the fossil record, and there are so many dinosaurs...monsters that were real!" she says. "You always get those couple of kids that are just captivated.

“The Earth has a phenomenal history of fits and starts and weirdness,” she continues. “The distribution of life today is such an artifact of the last billion years of evolution. I would say to my students who work on the Ediacara Biota, you have to have an imagination and think outside the box...imagine how these things lived. It’s like figuring out a mystery...you’re being a detective, and that’s fun! You pursue roots and lines of inquiry. We arrive piecemeal with facts and then put the puzzle together. Sometimes it comes slowly and other times you have ‘Eureka!’ moments. They are few and far between, but when they happen, they’re magical moments.”

Professor Droser says good fortune has imbued her life dating all the way back to the idyllic summers she spent floating around the tidal basins of Shelter Island and then coming to UC Riverside as a “green kid” almost 40 years ago and finding a nurturing home. We’d go a bit further and say academic rigor, deep curiosity and hard work have made Professor Droser’s luck...well, a sure thing!

Tags

Mary Droser

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

500-million-year-old worm fossil traces origins of insects and arachnids

tomwt — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:48:10 +0000

500-million-year-old worm fossil traces origins of insects and arachnids tomwt Wed, 11/20/2024 - 08:48 More CNAS in the Media Mrigakshi Dixit | Interesting Engineering November 18, 2024

INTERESTING ENGINEERING - Over 500 million years ago, the ancestors of a diverse group of animals known as Ecdysozoans existed. This group includes various species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms.

For a long time, the group’s early history was a blank page until now.

A team of researchers has identified the earliest known ecdysozoan fossil, which originated from the Precambrian era, the Ediacaran Period. The fossil is of a small, worm-like creature named Uncus dzaugisi.

The discovery fills a significant gap in the understanding of early animal evolution.

“Scientists have hypothesized for decades that this group must be older than the Cambrian, but until now its origins have remained enigmatic. This discovery reconciles a major gap between predictions based on molecular data and the lack of described ecdysozoans prior to the rich Cambrian fossils record and adds to our understanding of the evolution of animal life,” said Mary Droser, professor of geology at the University of California – Riverside, who led the study.

Read the Full Article

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

Mother-son team’s fossil find shows how nematodes—and all arthropods—arose

tomwt — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:30:48 +0000

Mother-son team’s fossil find shows how nematodes—and all arthropods—arose tomwt Wed, 11/20/2024 - 08:30 More CNAS in the Media Elizabeth Pennisi | Science November 19, 2024

SCIENCE MAGAZINE - Some of Ian Hughes’s earliest memories are of playing in the dust and digging holes while his mom and her colleagues searched for fossils in South Australia. His mother, University of California, Riverside, paleoecologist Mary Droser, was searching for fossilized remnants of animals from the Ediacaran era, stretching from approximately 635 million years ago to 541 million years ago, during which the first complex animals evolved.

Now a budding paleontologist himself, Hughes is part of a small team that has uncovered wormlike fossils in Nilpena Ediacara National Park in South Australia that provide a key clue to explaining how a large group of animals called ecdysozoans became so diverse. The fossils represent the earliest documented appearance of a group of animals that today are the most plentiful on Earth, the researchers report this week in Current Biology.

Read the Full Article

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

Half-a-billion-year-old 'marine Roomba' is earliest known asymmetrical animal

tomwt — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 15:37:04 +0000

Half-a-billion-year-old 'marine Roomba' is earliest known asymmetrical animal tomwt Tue, 10/22/2024 - 08:37 More CNAS in the Media Sierra Bouchér | Live Science October 21, 2024

LIVE SCIENCE - The earliest known animal to show evidence of an asymmetrical body lived over half a billion years ago in what is now the Australian outback, a new study reports.

The 555 million-year-old creature, dubbed Quaestio simpsonorum in a study published Sept. 3 in the journal Evolution and Development, was able to move around on the ocean floor like a "small marine Roomba vacuum," eating microscopic algae and bacteria. But this seemingly simple animal hid an exciting discovery: the unique "backward question mark"-shaped protrusion on its back is the first recorded example of an asymmetrical body pattern, a vital step in the evolution of complex life.

The fossils were discovered in South Australia's Nilpena Ediacara National Park, a fossil deposit that has been excavated for decades. Many of the earliest complex animal fossils have been found in the remote desert hills of Nilpena Ediacara National Park, but nothing like Quaestio had ever been seen before, the new study's researchers said.

...

"It’s incredibly insightful in terms of telling us about the unfolding of animal life on Earth," Mary Droser, a paleontologist at the University of California, Riverside and lead author of the study, said in the statement. "We’re the only planet that we know of with life, so as we look to find life on other planets, we can go back in time on Earth to see how life evolved on this planet."

Read the Full Article

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

At Australia’s new national park, see how life evolved on the planet

tomwt — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 20:08:44 +0000

At Australia’s new national park, see how life evolved on the planet tomwt Thu, 04/27/2023 - 13:08 More CNAS in the Media Chloe Berge | National Geographic April 27, 2023

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - In the mid-20th century, geologist Reg Sprigg made a stunning discovery in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges. Under the searing outback sun, he unearthed delicate impressions made by animals that lived some 550 million years ago—the missing piece in our understanding of evolution that had long eluded naturalist Charles Darwin.

Called the Ediacaran biota (named after the Ediacara Hills where they were found), the fossils outline animals similar to modern-day anemones or seaworms and range from a few centimeters to a few feet long. They explain the transition between single-cell organisms and the hard-bodied, predatory animals of the Cambrian Explosion, or Biological Big Bang. It’s a key evolutionary step that Darwin wrestled with, known as Darwin’s Dilemma.

Now, the new Nilpena Ediacara National Park is preserving the revelatory fossils, offering travelers an up-close look at the scientifically rich area where they were found.

Mary Droser, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Riverside, has been the lead scientist at Nilpena for over 20 years. Droser and her team have made several significant Ediacaran biota discoveries in the area.

READ THE ARTICLE

Tags

Mary Droser

Four professors honored with Senate Faculty Awards

ilseu — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 19:07:34 +0000

Four professors honored with Senate Faculty Awards ilseu Wed, 06/24/2020 - 12:07 More College News Imran Ghori | Inside UCR June 24, 2020

Four UC Riverside faculty members were honored by the Graduate Division and Academic Senate with 2019-20 Senate Faculty Awards (three of them CNAS faculty), announced in a letter on June 16.

Kate Sweeny

Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology; and Flip Tanedo, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy; both received the Commitment to Graduate Diversity Award, which recognizes those working to create a more inclusive environment.

Flip Tanedo

Students and colleagues who nominated Sweeny described her as a “true champion of diversity” who creates an atmosphere of empathy and support for graduate students.

Tanedo was praised for helping to create the Physics Organization for Womxn and the Under-Represented, or POWUR, which is focused on promoting diversity and inclusion, and working to improve diversity in the Physics and Astronomy Department.

The Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentor Award went to John Baez, a professor of mathematics; and Mary Droser, a professor of geology. The award recognizes faculty members who demonstrate a strong dedication to serving as advisors and mentors to graduate students.

John Baez

Baez has developed a long legacy of advising and mentoring students and colleagues, many of whom credited his influence for pursuing graduate studies, according to nomination letters.

Mary Droser

Droser received several nominations from students who have gone on to some of the most prestigious universities and museums in the U.S. They praised her as a mentor who inspires students to pursue their passions, whatever the field.

Read the original article online:

Tags

This worm-like creature is the first ancestor on the human and animal family tree

ilseu — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 21:56:51 +0000

This worm-like creature is the first ancestor on the human and animal family tree ilseu Mon, 03/23/2020 - 14:56 More CNAS in the Media Ashley Strickland| CNN March 23, 2020

CNN - Evidence of a worm-like creature about the size of a grain of rice has been uncovered in South Australia, and researchers believe it is the oldest ancestor on the family tree that includes humans and most animals.

The creature lived 555 million years ago.

"We thought these animals should have existed during this interval, but always understood they would be difficult to recognize," Evans said. "Once we had the 3D scans, we knew that we had made an important discovery."

READ THE article

Tags

Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences

Mary Droser

Nilpena Station