PeerJ Award Winners at The 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress

The 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress once again brought together a vibrant global community of researchers, blending the familiar benefits of traditional academic meetings with the accessibility of an online platform. With engaging discussions, thought-provoking guest lectures, and a wealth of fascinating research on display, the event was a true celebration of palaeontology. We’re thrilled to shine a spotlight on the outstanding contributions of this year’s PeerJ Award winners—read on to discover their work and what made them stand out!

 

Elsa Leflaëc PhD student at the Instituto Cavanilles de Biodiversidad y Biología Evolutiva, of the Universitat de València, in Spain.

 

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

I am a PhD student in palaeontology. I did my Bachelor’s degree in geology at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, in Brest (France), and then my Master’s degree in palaeobiology in both Université de Lille (France) and Uppsala Universitat (Sweden). I am now working in Valencia, Spain, on the evolution of Devonian fishes (around 400-350 million years ago). My research interest is mostly the evolution of vertebrates, how they adapted, or did not adapt, to a change in environment or living conditions. I am currently working on what happened to jawless fishes (agnathans), who were highly diversified in the Silurian, but then disappeared in the Devonian, to the benefit of jawed vertebrates (gnathostomes), who now represent the vast majority of vertebrates taxa.

 

What first interested you in this field of research?

I have always been interested in evolution, how lineages evolved towards the living beings we know now, as well as the impact of the living environment on the evolution of an organism. In the current context of climate change, I think it is essential to understand how animals and plants evolve, and to what degree they can survive changes. Even though I am not directly working on that, I believe that participating in the understanding of the factors playing a role in the evolutionary ability of the orgeanisms is important.

 

Can you briefly explain the research you presented at the 5th Palaeontological Virtual Congress?

At the Palaeontological Virtual Congress, I presented my work on the ecospace saturation hypothesis in the early vertebrate evolution. This hypothesis suggests that a group of jawless fishes from the Devonian (heterostracans) had explored all the possibilities for more efficient and functional morphologies before going extinct. To do so, 3D models of the headshields of heterostracans were produced, the shape variation was quantified and analyzed (using geometric morphometrics), and a theoretical morphospace was created. This allowed to extract 60 theoretical morphologies, from thin and flat, to bulky. On these theoretical 3D models, I used a method to simulate a fluid flow around an object (Computational Fluid Dynamics), to study the hydrodynamics of the morphologies of heterostracans. I found that even though heterostracans had a very high diversity of headshield morphologies, they did not explore all the possibilities. This shows that, whether it was because of a lack of evolutionary time, or the competition with jawed vertebrates, the reason for the decline of heterostracans was not reaching the most optimal morphology of the headshield.

 

What are your next steps? How will you continue to build on this research?

I am currently only in the first year of my PhD, so there is still a lot to do. My PhD is about the causes of the turnover from jawless to jawed vertebrates in the Devonian, and for now I only have tested one of the hypotheses. My next steps are to use different methods, computational for the most part, to continue testing other hypotheses from the literature, such as the increase of predation from the gnathostomes over the agnathans, and the displacements or losses of habitat. Currently, I am looking at the predation hypothesis, using a method (Finite Element Analysis) showing the reaction of an object exposed to a pressure point, and measuring stress or strain.