Armed with a National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant, Boyer and her students have spent the last two summers in the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada, attempting to crack the case.
ROCK HILL, SOUTH CAROLINA – Dinosaurs fascinated Diana Boyer as a child, like they do for so many children.
Years later, you can find Boyer, now a geology professor at Winthrop University, studying fossils and trying to answer the great paleontological mystery: “What Caused the Late Devonian Mass Extinction?”
Armed with a National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant, Boyer and her students have spent the last two summers in the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada, attempting to crack the case.
Boyer and colleagues at Williams College and Appalachian State are part of the Devonian Anoxia, Geochemistry, Geochronology, and Extinction Research (DAGGER) project. DAGGER chronicled their work in a series of educational videos and content housed on the Paleontological Research Institution’s Earth@home site, which heavily features the work of Boyer and Winthrop students.
About the Research
Earth has undergone five major mass extinctions. People are most familiar with the Cretaceous extinction, in which a meteor destroyed the dinosaurs and set up the planet’s next stage.
“[The Cretaceous mass extinction] is by far the most famous one,” Boyer explained in the videos. “Scientists have spent hundreds of years studying why these happened, and out of the five, we understand four of them very well. The one that continues to mystify and excite is the Late Devonian mass extinction. We literally still do not know why it happened.”
The Late Devonian mass extinction occurred approximately 365 million years ago and appears to have primarily affected the marine communities of the time due to “marine anoxia,” a lack of oxygen in the water. This is closely correlated with the establishment of the first forests on Earth.
Boyer finds that unknown “exciting.”
“Although we don’t have the answer, we do know the questions to ask,” she explained. “Just like a crime scene investigator, we need to approach this particularly tricky mystery from all sides and scales.”
Tools include patterns in the rock layers, hand samples and signals preserved at the atomic scale, along with geochemistry tools such as pyrite framboids, trace metals and specific fossils. All of these can help eliminate potential causes and narrow down triggers for that extinction.
About Boyer
Boyer’s young fascination with dinosaurs translated into high-school opportunities.
“As a high-school student, I was able to participate in field paleontology with a generous faculty member at a local university,” she said. “That is what really got me hooked on field work and paleontology and showed me that I could actually make a career out of it.”
She earned her undergraduate degree in geology from the University of Delaware and an M.S. and Ph.D., both in geology, from the University of California, Riverside. Her doctoral research focused on fossil communities in high-stress (low oxygen) settings as preserved in black shale deposits of New York. She worked at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oswego before joining the Winthrop community in 2016.
For more information, please contact Boyer at boyerd@winthrop.edu.
