Pander Society Newsletter 2015

Welcome to the 2015 edition of the Pander Society Newsletter, my sixth attempt at providing news and a list of conodont publications for the past year! I apologize for the tardy release of this issue due to several concurrent causes that, I hope, will be neutralized by the early publication of the 2016 Newsletter. Our community has suffered profound losses in conodont studies with the passing of great figures. Dick Aldridge (whose memorial appeared in the previous newsletter) was Chief Panderer and a Pander medallist. He had been one of the foremost palaeontologists globally, having been chairman of the International Palaeontological Association. Anita Harris, ‘inventor’ of the Colour Alteration Index (CAI), has been one of the brightest minds in the world of conodonts. Her generosity in sending CAI standards to those who requested one, allowed the application of her method to the collections of all of us. Glen Merrill, a renowned specialist mainly on multielement taxonomy of Carboniferous conodonts, was one of the first to propose that conodont distributions were environmentally controlled. We learned only recently about the premature passing of Vladimir Prokopievich Tarabukin in July 2013. His early studies were on biostratigraphy and Devonian conodonts of eastern Yakutia; his later studies focused on Ordovician biostratigraphy and conodonts of northeast Asia. His Ordovician conodonts enabled him to hypothesise reconstructions of the complicated fold systems of the eastern Siberian Platform. The year 2014 saw proliferation of research on conodonts in all perspectives of biostratigraphy, palaeoecology, palaeogeography, ontogeny and taxonomy, the last fruitfully on apparatus reconstructions and geochemistry, all aired in formal and informal meetings of the Pander Society. The first formal meeting of the year was the Pander Society Workshop foreshadowed in the 2014 Newsletter, was held in Bologna in February 2014. It was professionally organized by Claudia (Spalletta) for proposing, inter alia, planning for the next International Conodont Symposium (ICOS- 4) to be held in Valencia, Spain, in 2017. During that event Maria Corriga was awarded a Hinde medal. The second formal Pander Society meeting was held in Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada) in October 2014 in association with the Geological Society of America. The session, sponsored by the Paleontological Society and the Pander Society and organized by Charles Henderson, focused on conodonts as stratigraphic and palaeoclimatic tools. The 4th annual meeting of the IGCP 591, hosted in Estonia in June 2014, was organized jointly with the Department of Geology of the University of Tartu, the Institute of Geology of the Tallinn University of Technology, and with support from the Geological Society of Estonia. It targeted evolutionary palaeoecology and palaeobiogeography. The event brought together a large number of conodont specialists as did the 2014 Field Workshop of IGCP 591 in Kunming (China) in August 2014 jointly with ISOS and ISCS, whose formal theme was ‘Global Events and their relationships in the Early to Middle Paleozoic’. No dedicated Pander Society meeting was organized during the 4th International Palaeontological Congress in Mendoza, Argentina, between the end September and early October 2014. Nevertheless much research dealing with conodonts was presented in several sessions. In Provo, Utah, in the presence of family and friends, David Clark was awarded the Pander Society medal by Ray Scott. David “was one of the international leaders in modern conodont research and played an outstanding role as researcher and teacher” as written in one of the letters supporting his nomination. The ceremony took place on 13 September at David’s home and was given a re-run in the 3 field close to an Ordovician section. I thank Ray Scott for bestowing the Pander medal on my behalf. Because I could not attend all meetings, I am grateful to each of you who provided information that I could insert in the newsletter. I thank those who urged partners in work as well as masters and PhD students to join the Pander Society. I also thank all those who sent changes of addresses and emails of colleagues. Thank you for sending in your contributions! Thanks also to Susana Garcia-Lopez, John Repetski and Wang Cheng-Yuan for deliberating on nominations for the Society's medals. I am always grateful to Claudia Spalletta and Myriam Matteucci for helping me generate this newsletter. Special thanks go to Myriam for her enormous help in assembling the entire bibliography and providing the version in EndNote of this year’s entries. Thanks also to John Talent for cleaning up my ‘Italish’.