An international team of scientists, co-led by Dr. Turner of the Department of Anatomical Sciences, has discovered a new species of extinct bird from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. The toucan-like beak of this important new specimen shows that some Cretaceous birds evolved a strikingly modern-looking bird skull using an arrangement of skull bones more typical of their dinosaurian cousins. Read about this exciting discovery in the SBU Press Room, and check out the paper in the journal Nature.
Drs. Turner and Wilberg are expanding their research on crocodylomorph phylogeny and morphological evolution with a $500,000 award from the National Science Foundation in 2017.
MorphoBank has now received 20 years of NSF funding with a new supplementary award to Dr. O’Leary. Her collaboration will move MorphoBank to Phoenix Bioinformatics to ensure long term support for this community resource.
Ph.D. candidate Kate Corbin’s outstanding Renaissance School of Medicine teaching was recognized by the unversity with a 2019 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.