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Showing posts from July, 2020

Paisley Caves research makes the news!

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I'm a bit late posting about this as all the buzz was almost two weeks ago, but I'm happy to say that we have recently published one of the major papers from our NERC project at Paisley Caves . The project is almost at an end, and I'm pleased we managed to get everything done on schedule and within budget (including an extension due to my maternity leave halfway through!). What a wonderful 4 years it has been working on this amazing site. I can't believe it's been 3 years since I was blogging about our fieldwork  out in Oregon. So much hard work has gone in since then, especially from our postdoctoral researchers John Blong and Helen Whelton, and I'm really proud of the whole team. In summary, we applied a new lipid biomarker approach to identify the species of coprolites. Previously these had been identified using ancient DNA, but there were concerns regarding possible contamination and movement of DNA in the sediments. There is a lot we still don't know ab