US - Peru Planning Visit: Planning a Collaborative Program of Vertebrate Paleontology in Northwestern Peru

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This U.S. - Peru planning visit award will establish a collaborative program of vertebrate paleontology in northwestern Peru by forming a partnership between University of Florida (UF) and Universidad Nacional de Piura (UNP). The program will support one senior researcher and two U.S. graduate students under the direction of Dr. David Steadman from UF and they will collaborate with Dr. Jean-Noël Martinez, Director of the Institute of Paleontology at UNP, and his students. Students and professors from both schools will plan a research program for which larger-scale funding will be pursued in 2012-13. Researchers have long been interested in the distribution and diversity of animals in the American tropics, and how changing climates (glacial-interglacial cycles) have affected these phenomena. The planning visits will focus on field and laboratory research at the Talara Tar Seeps (TTS), an asphaltic natural trap with abundant 20,000 year old fossils of amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. There have been no formal excavations at the TTS since the 1950s and 1960s. However, evidence of a wetter past climate comes from previously excavated TTS fossils, indicating a richer plant community must have existed once at TTS. Dr. Martinez, a leading authority on Peruvian fossil mammals, and his students have discovered vertebrate fossils in many localities within 500 kilometers of Piura. The UNP team will study the resulting mammal fossils, whereas the UF team will study the bird fossils, and both teams will study the amphibian and reptile fossils. The analyses of fossils will vastly improve the understanding of past climate change in this climatically sensitive region.This international collaboration will provide opportunities to train, educate, and bring together students and researchers from the United States and Peru. In addition to establishing collaborations with their Peruvian colleagues, UF scientists will give lectures at UNP while two U.S. graduate students will receive an international research experience from this award. Furthermore, Peruvian undergraduate students will be given the opportunity to travel to UF and develop directed research projects with UF students. Finally, these visits have the potential to generate a larger international program that will expand our knowledge of how changing past climates in the American tropics have affected the biodiversity of the region.