Hermsen Lab

Festive sauropod skull at the Mef In early January, I traveled to Trelew, Argentina, to examine fossils from the Cretaceous La Colonia and Eocene Laguna del Hunco floras held at the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (Mef) in Trelew, Argentina. These fossils included mosquito ferns ( Azolla ), which I am studying with colleagues María A. Gandolfo and Nathan Jud of Cornell University. Check out our recent abstract from the Geological Society of America Annual Meeting (2017) here .

Laguna del Hunco A new paper describing fossil Ceratopetalum (coachwood, New South Wales Christmas bush) fruits has been published in Annals of Botany . The paper documents new winged fruits from the early Eocene (ca. 52 million years old) Laguna del Hunco flora of Chubut Province, Patagonia, Argentina. I co-authored the paper with Dr. María A. Gandolfo of Cornell University. Update (March 2017): A short synopsis of the paper can be found in the Content Snapshots  section of the March 2017 issue of  Annals of Botany. 

Eucalyptus,  Natural Bridges State Beach, California The  October 2015 Land for Wildlife South East Queensland newsletter  features a summary of a 2012 paper on Eucalyptus from the early Eocene (ca. 52 million-year-old) Laguna del Hunco flora of Patagonia, Argentina, by Doug Mohr. I co-authored the  original study , which was featured in the August 2012 issue of  American Journal of Botany,  with María A. Gandolfo of Cornell University and María del Carmen Zamaloa of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. 

Fossil wood from the Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, New York Over the summer, Dr. María A. Gandolfo and myself published a new paper entitled " Fruits of Juglandaceae from the Eocene of South America " in Systematic Botany . The accompanying data files are housed in the Dryad Digital Repository. This is part of a large ongoing research project on the Paleogene fossil floras of Patagonia.  In August, I attended the 10th Annual Summer Symposium at the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York. I gave an updated presentation on the fossil record of water clovers, entitled "Fossil water clovers and wannabees."