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.

Victor López Rojas, PhD Candidate of the Doctoral Program of Geology at the Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade NOVA de Lisboa; Museu da Lourinhã.

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

I am a Spanish student in Portugal, who likes dinosaurs and paleontology thanks to Jurassic Park films (as most of people of mid20s-30s) and ended up studying this “almost-crocs” animals, the phytosaurs, because the weirder and uglier the fossil and species is, the more interesting is to understand their evolution and lifestyle. These animals (phytosaurs) have been known before the word “dinosaur” was first ever used (phytosaur in 1828, while dinosaur in 1842), and even though their first description (phytosaur = plant reptile) has changed a bit through time, the research on this clade has been focused on their bizarre skulls almost two centuries. Although some research tried to shed light on their lifestyle focusing on their axial and appendicular skeleton, not so many have been done. Recently, with new interest and approach to this clade and other pseudosuchians, researchers started to find out more about phytosaur lifestyle and phylogenetics. My PhD is focused on these not so well studied parts from the phytosaur, such as mandibles, to better understand this Triassic clade.

What first interested you in this field of research?

Mostly, their weird skull shape. Their nostrils are not on the anterior tip of their rostrum, as most animals have. They migrated posteriorly onto a region close to the eyes. As for a potentially ambush aquatic predator, it makes sense. But then, why nowadays crocodiles did not develop it again? Also, their external resemblance so close to extant crocodiles, yet phytosaurs are farther from a crocodile than aetosaurs (armored pseudosuchians) and, at some point, phytosaurs were not even enclosed as archosaurs with crocodiles, dinosaurs and pterosaurs. Their most characteristic feature is also the one that is giving paleontologists more work, and that is rather interesting.

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

The research is part of my PhD, and we wanted to focus little by little on each type of bones on phytosaurs: cranial, axial, and appendicular. We started with the mandible because it is the one that has been more studied in other reptiles, but in phytosaurs not so much. We sampled a few mandibles from species that we could access (either me in collection visits, or published) and use geometric-morphometric analyses on the posterior region of the mandible to try to find out differences among them. We not only found morphological differences, but the preliminary results showed that there could be phylogenetic signals. To test it, we ran a phylogenetic analysis, and we also added mandible specimens with problematic interpretation to test it… and we found interesting results!

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

This manuscript is in its final steps and we hope we can continue doing this type of research on the axial and appendicular skeleton on phytosaurs. Maybe not all the bones in the skeleton have phylogenetic importance, but we want to shed light on their lifestyle and evolution, as they look too much to nowadays crocodiles, however, they are nothing alike.