Today I continued conducting quadrat sampling in the amazing Ligurian Sea. This series of photos shows a quadrat sampling session - from snorkelling to spotting a burrow with a mound! Each and every quadrat-based observation is georeferenced by GPS, so that in the laboratory I…
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Today I photographed paired openings on the seafloor. These openings have been produced by burrowing bivalves (clams) to keep contact with the oxygenated seawater. The fossil burrows Siphonichnus and Teichichnus are possible analogues of this burrow system, spotted on the sandy seafloor of the Ligurian…
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On some seafloors of the Ligurian Sea, sediment mounds tower smaller openings. Each mound is likely to be connected with the nearby openings, forming a tunnel system that resembles the fossil burrow Thalassinoides. Thalassinoides is a genus of fossil burrow consisting of horizontal branched tunnels…
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A major part of my on-going research focuses on burrows and trails. However, the geological (sedimentological) context cannot be ignored when studying the products of organism-substrate interactions. In fact, sediment texture commonly reflects the hydrodynamic setting. In the images of this post, you can see…
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Here are some highlights from today’s snorkelling survey, mapping burrows from the coastline to the shoreface.
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The fossil record preserves abundant horizontal traces with sediment pads. These traces, known as Nereites , have tradistionally been attributed to worm tracemakers, but then researchers pictured horseshoe crabs leaving Nereites-like traces. I also documentes Nereites-like traces made by arthropods (hermit crabs) in the Adriatic…
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What are those green spheres? They are algae of the species Codium bursa! During today's actuopaleontology survey I also met damselfishes (Chromis chromis), pen shells (Pinna sp.) and sea urchins.
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Today I spotted a gastropod leaving a locomotion trail... almost identical to Archaeonassa, an ichnofossil known from the Precambrian!
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I was excited about today’s snorkelling dive in the Thyrrenian Sea, on the Italian coast. I was there to map burrows, but the richness of underwater life deserved some non-ichnological photos!
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I got these pictures of this amazing octopus (within its burrow) while mapping burrows on the seafloor of the Ligurian sea.
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Here are some highlights from today’s actuopaleontological snorkelling survey, including a pen shell (Pinna sp.) and the Mediterranean red sea star (Echinaster sepositus)
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A major part of my on-going research is mapping the products of modern life-substrate interactions – e.g. burrows and trails. However, sometimes it is impossible to ignore other wonders of the marine ecosystem such as these fishes, including damselfishes (Chromis chromis) and saddled seabreams (Oblada…
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