Senior Honor's Thesis Research |
| I am a Senior in the Amherst College Geology Department. I commenced research for my Senior Thesis last January when my advisor, Whitey Hagadorn and I travelled to rocks exposed in the Caborca region of Sonora, Mexico. Here, we sought and found Cloudina, an extinct tube-like fossil that lived during the Ediacaran (~550 mya). Cloudina is one of the earliest known biomineralizing organisms. Shortly after it came into existence it suddenly went extinct. No one knows why it first appeared or why it suddenly disappeared. These are the questions that my research is trying to answer. I have performed shellbed analyses on these Cloudina rich beds and I have sampled the intervals in which the Cloudina beds occur for geochemical analyses in order to characterize the environmental shifts that were coincident with the existence of Cloudina. This past summer I returned to the field with Ben Klein ('10) and Emmy "Echinoderm" Smith. But this time I studied and sampled Cloudina shellbeds in the White Inyos Mountains of Californina and Mount Dunfee, Nevada. Now, I jump for joy because I've finished my thesis which you can read below. |
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| My Thesis |
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