Jakob Vinther's personal webpage
My name is Jakob Vinther and I study palaeontology. I am currently doing a Ph.D. at Yale University in the United States. I am originally from Denmark, I studied at University of Copenhagen and did a masters before taking the big step and moved to the US.
I am primarily interested in the emergence and interrelationship of animals, the Metazoa. They radiated in a period between the Precambrian and Cambrian (600-500 million years ago) in popular terms "The Cambrian explosion". The reason for such a striking name is the fact that it is seems that most animal groups evolved from a common ancestor in a short interval of time during this period.
My main focus has been the molluscs. This group consists of forms like the squids, octopuses, bivalves, snails, slugs and other less known forms, like the scaphopods, monoplacophorans, aplacophorans and chitons (Polyplacophora). The two latter groups has been my main interest in my Bachelor and Masters thesis, where I related them to a group of Lower-Middle Cambrian forms called sachitids.
Another major group of interest is the annelids. They are characterized by a segmented bodyplan and comprises forms like the earth worms, leeches and sea mice. Their basal interelationships and diversification is relatively unknown. Recently we have found out that a bizarre group of Palaeozoic skeletal plates called machaeridians are in fact polychaete annelids (Vinther et al. Nature). This is of major interest, as it shows that some annelids actually developed a mineralized armor that is functionally similar to the molluskan skeleton in many ways. Mean while, the machaeridians appear in the Early Ordovician, a time that maybe the crown group of annelids diverged, macheridians are probably an early extinct off shoot of this divergence. The work was done in collaboration with Peter Van Roy (UCD), who discovered the fossil in the Anti Atlas Mountains of Morocco and saw the importance of the fossil and made the excellent drawings that is accompanying the paper. The senior author is Derek Briggs. See the press release here.
The Sachitida He, 1980 is a diverse group of fossil scales (sclerites) which is common in marine deposits all over the world in the Lower and Middle Cambrian. One form, called Halkieria is known from North Greenland in the Sirius Passet Lagerstätte (about 520 million years old). At this locality, a number of complete fossils has been recovered. Halkieria has important implications for our understanding of the sachitids, since it shows us how the entire animal is organized. It also retain some important aspects to allow the reconstruction of early molluscan evolution.
My supervisor is professor Derek E. G. Briggs. Most people probably know him from his work on the arthropods and taphonomy on the Burgess shale., which became famous when Stephen Jay Gould popularized the locality and the Cambrian explosion in his book "Wonderful Life" Several geology students that have had palaeontology probably recognize Derek´s name from one of their textbooks called "Palaeobiology" which was edited by Briggs and Crowther.
I am currently working on the aesthetal system within the shell plates of chitons. This is an amazing and very complex sensory and secretory system, not seen in many other forms. Possibly the esthetal canal system already existed in the sachitids, but within the sclerites instead of the shell plates, which can help us understand how this canal system evolved.
In order to assess the relationship of the mollusks and to evaluate the fossils in a phylogenetic scheme I am sequencing a number of genes from an array of mollusks. This is done in collaboration with Erik Sperling, Yale University and Kevin Peterson, Dartmouth.
I am also working on early sponge interrelationships together with Stefan Bengtson. The Lower and Middle Cambrian Eiffelia has recently been shown by Botting and Butterfield (2004 in PNAS) to retain some potentially crucial links between the hexactinellids and the calcareous sponges.
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