2021 Alfred Sherwood Romer Prize awarded to Lucas Weaver, U-M postdoctoral fellow in vertebrate paleontology
Lucas Weaver, a NSF postdoctoral fellow in EEB and affiliate of the U-M Museum of Paleontology, has been awarded the prestigious 2021 Alfred Sherwood Romer Prize for his dissertation work from the University of Washington on the life history of multituberculates, an extinct group of superficially rodent-like mammals.
Luke summarized his dissertation work as:
”Multituberculates were the most successful mammals that lived during the Mesozoic, the "Age of Dinosaurs." They greatly outnumbered and were more evolutionarily and ecologically diverse than contemporary mammal groups, and they existed from the Jurassic through the Eocene, an evolutionary lifespan of around 140 million years. What made multituberculates so successful for much of the Mesozoic and early Cenozoic ("Age of Mammals"), and what drove their eventual extinction around 35 million years ago remains unclear. My dissertation aimed to better understand the paleobiology of multituberculates using a combination of linear morphometrics, comparative anatomy, functional morphology, sedimentology, taphonomy, and bone histology to shed light on their ecomorphology, behavior, and life history. I discovered that some multituberculates exhibited social behavior, similar to that of small burrowing mammals alive today (e.g., chipmunks), representing the earliest evidence of mammalian sociality. I also found that multituberculates may have had long pregnancies and short suckling periods, similar to that of modern small placental mammals. Together, these findings show that multituberculates were far from being an "archaic" group that simply couldn't compete with "advanced" placental mammals in the aftermath of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Instead, my research suggests that multituberculates approached a level of behavioral and reproductive complexity on par with that of modern small placentals, and the decline of multituberculates may be related to their highly specialized dentitions, which might have constrained their ability to exploit newly emerging food resources in a post-dinosaur (except birds) world."
The Alfred Sherwood Romer Prize recognizes outstanding scientific contribution in Vertebrate Paleontology by a predoctoral student, and is considered the most prestigious award at this career stage in the discipline. Selection of Romer Prize session participants is based on the scientific value and quality of a submitted abstract summarizing an original research project. The prize is awarded based on the scientific value and quality of the oral presentation of that research during the Romer Prize session at the SVP Annual Meeting. Sourced from vertpaleo.org/romer-prize.
