Progressive Palaeontology (ProgPal) is an annual conference ran by postgraduate students for postgraduate students only that aims to provide attendees with a chance to gain experience presenting and networking at a palaeontology conference. This year’s iteration, ProgPal 2024, was hosted at the University of Bristol and featured a pre-conference event on natural history documentaries, workshops on CT data processing and museum curation, as well as an excellent selection of talks and poster presentations by a wide variety of research students from all over the U.K. and even from some abroad. With over 130 registrations, this was the biggest ProgPal yet, and also had a hybrid element for attendees who could only participate remotely. You can find out more about ProgPal 2024 at https://www.palass.org/meetings-events/progressive-palaeontology/2024/progressive-palaeontology-2024-bristol-uk-overview

Hady George, ProgPal 2024 

Laura Cooper PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your research interests?

My PhD is on the plants of the early Devonian Rhynie chert, a fossil site dating from 407 million years ago that preserves plants as they began to establish on land. The activity of silica rich hot spring waters preserved this whole ecosystem in exquisite, three dimensional, cellular detail not rivalled by any other fossil site in the world. I have been imaging the tissue of these plants using high resolution techniques (confocal and SEM) to determine if these early plant species had phloem (sugar conducting tissue) like that of modern species, to give insight into the early evolution of this crucial plant tissue.

What first interested you in this field of research?

I did my undergraduate in general biology, with a leaning towards plant science developed during my time volunteering in a herbarium, and a strong interest in big questions on the evolution of life. My supervisor (Sandy Hetherington) gave a lecture in my final year of undergrad on the Rhynie chert, and I was completely captivated by the absolutely perfect preservation found in these extremely old and evolutionarily fascinating plants.

Can you briefly explain the research you presented at ProgPal 2024?

I presented on the enigmatic organism Prototaxites, the first giant organism on Earth, which reached heights of 7m tall but was composed entirely of tubes. I presented work I did as part of a big collaboration, for which I imaged Prototaxites from the Rhynie chert using the confocal techniques I developed for the plant fossils from the site. The paper is currently out for review so I can’t say much about it, but the audience did like the part where I compared the tubes of this organism to different types of pasta!

How will you continue to build on this research?

I will be writing this up as part of my PhD very soon, it was great to be given a chance to use my skills at imaging Rhynie chert plant fossils on a collaboration which will hopefully be published soon!