Dr. Rod Taylor

It's new publication day this #FossilFriday! My colleague Duncan McIlroy has just published a manuscript outlining lines of evidence used to determine mode of life of the #Ediacaran #Rangeomorpha. Interesting stuff! doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2…

#Exceptionally preserved 551-million-year-old fossils indicate the Avalon biota persisted longer than previously believed, suggesting a more severe biodiversity loss during the Kotlin Crisis extinction event. @geosociety phys.org/news/2026-02-e…

@GSAPublications @MemorialUSci @MUN_EarthSci @WhereLifeGotBig @NLGEOCENTRE

The team at Geology were also amazing. Here's a link to the article: pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/ar… @GSAPublications @MemorialUSci @MUN_EarthSci @WhereLifeGotBig @discoverygeonl

Happy #FossilFriday! Here's a thread about the Inner Meadow biota, its unexpected #Ediacaran Date, and a refocusing of Martin Brasier’s #KotlinCrisis. A link to our just-published paper on the remarkable significance of the Inner Meadow site follows below in this thread.

2/2 Palaeontology isn't just about counting or describing new organisms, it's also about understanding how they lived and interacted with each other.

1/2 A reconstruction of Lydonia jiggamintia, a newly described #Ediacaran organism from #Newfoundland, lying on the ancient matground-covered seafloor overgrowing a decaying Fractofusus andersoni. Paper available (for free) here: bit.ly/4gQ1xF7

New #Ediacaran paper alert! The sponge-like #Lydonia jiggamintia is named for the spiky-topped punk legend John Lydon [aka Johnny Rotten]. The species name is derived from the word for gooseberry in the language of the Beothuk people of #Newfoundland. palaeo-electronica.org/content/2025/5…

@neeleshmisra Whenever I talk about the discovery of the Mistaken Point fossil site on tours here at the Johnson Geo Centre in St. John's, I make a point of namedropping your father - credit where it's due. 👍

A student in Canada from a remote Indian village in UP, my father S B Misra discovered 565 million years old fossils at Mistaken Point, Newfoundland in the 1960s, plugging a hole in Darwin’s theory of evolution. His discovery led to the site being declared a World Heritage Site. He returned to India in the 1960s to start a village school, his childhood dream that he fulfilled with my late mother, Nirmala Misra. The credit here is given to his intern, Paul Thompson! We fought, my brother and I, to restore our father’s deserved credit — and decades later, one of the fossils was indeed named after my father — Fractofusus Misrai. Still, my father’s name is nowhere on the plaque at the site he helped discover — which earned Canada millions of tourism dollars. A wrong that is waiting to be corrected by Canada. @CBCNL @markjcarne @GovNL @LtGovNL @HCI_Ottawa @CanadainIndia @MEAIndia @munpaleobiology @FossilRod @parkscanada @GovNL_ECC @MemorialUSci @BBCScienceNews @unesco @cbsscience #DuncanMcilroy @Yara_Haridy @MesozoicMuse @Evo_Deva @JayKingIngram #JonathanJarry @SeamusORegan