Our speaker via Zoom in November is Dr. Arjan Mann. Arjan recently received his PhD from Carleton University in Toronto. He is transitioning to a postdoc position at Harvard. Arjan co-authored articles naming two new species of microsaurs called Diabloroter and Infernovenator. The title of his talk is “New Tetrapod Discoveries from Mazon Creek”.
Here's a link to some information about him:
https://newsroom.carleton.ca/story/filling-fossil-record/
Hell hunter and devil digger. When Arjan Mann names a species, he doesn’t mess around.
As part of his PhD research into carboniferous period creatures, the Carleton Earth Sciences student identified two new species. The two species date from about 310 million years ago, when the ancestors of modern reptiles, birds and mammals were moving permanently on to land.
The first he named Diabloroter — devil digger. Mann studied the specimen at the Field Museum in Chicago, where it had been preserved in a devilishly red latex peel. Its hard skull is similar in structure to modern animals that burrow, digging into the earth by compacting soil with their heads.
The second of the two creatures was an elongated, short-limbed animal that would have moved by sidewinding — much like a modern snake. He called it Infernovenator (hell hunter) to stick with the hellish theme.
