Grad Student Michael Chiappone Receives NAPC Award

Michael Chiappone, a third year PhD candidate working with Pete Makovicky, was awarded a certificate of achievement for delivering an outstanding talk at the North American Paleontology Convention (NAPC) during their annual meeting in June, held at the University of Michigan. His award was supported by the journal PeerJ and publisher Taylor & Francis, who also as part of the award are offering to pay for a future publication of Michael’s research.

Michael’s talk was titled Fluvial mobility of hadrosauroid dinosaur skeletons: experimentally testing transport potential in extinct reptiles, which he presented in NAPC’s Taphonomy talk session. Taphonomy is the study of the process of fossilization, and for his own work Michael is interested in how bones of various sizes and shapes move across and eventually settle in fluvial environments. He is specifically utilizing a classification system known as Voorhies Groups, which consists of three groupings that differ based on an environment’s flow conditions. Voorhies Groups have been used in past taphonomic studies to classify fossil fluvial sites, however in his talk Michael emphasized how direct experimentation can allow us to see the entire process, from bone movement to burial, in a fluvial system. Michael then shared in his talk his initial findings from conducting such experiments at the University of Minnesota’s Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) in the summer of 2023. 

For his experiments, Michael takes 3D printed bones and runs them through multiple simulations using the main channel flume at SAFL as an artificial river system. While the channel is flooded, Michael captures in video the transportation process of the bones. He then photographs each bone after the simulation, taking detailed account of bone position and degree of burial, but also of the impressions the bones might make in the sand itself. So far in his experiments, Michael has found that Voorhies Groups do not necessarily predict how far bones move during transport, which he reported on in his NAPC talk. Michael ran his simulations on both hadrosauroids (“duck-billed” dinosaurs and close relatives) and sheep, but he plans to continue these experiments for an expanded range of taxa, in turn allowing him to quantify the critical mobility of these bones. 

Michael has enjoyed the research environment at SAFL, specifically the amount he gets to be hands-on with his work, as well as the convenience of SAFL being right in his back yard. Even more recently, during the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) annual meeting which was held this fall in Minneapolis, Michael helped design and run tours of SAFL for multiple paleontologists, showing them both the SAFL facility as a whole but also how they might utilize the lab for their own taphonomic studies.