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» Caroline A.E. Strömberg, Ph.D.
Curator of Paleobotany
caestrom@u.washington.edu (206) 543-0495 BIOGRAPHY
2007 Postdoctoral Fellow, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 2004-2006 Postdoctoral Fellow, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden 2003 Ph.D., Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley 1997 B.A., M.Sc., Department of Geology, Lund University, Sweden
RESEARCH
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Cenozoic evolution of grasses and grazers The evolution of grassland ecosystems was one of the most profound ecological changes of the past 65 million years, but many questions remain as to when it occurred and what triggered it. A traditional, yet untested assumption is that many animals (e.g., horses, dung beetles) evolved in lockstep with the spread of grass-dominated vegetation. I investigate these questions by using a novel source of paleobotanical data, plant silica (phytoliths), integrated with information from, for example, sedimentology, modern ecology, plant anatomy, and vertebrate paleontology. This work entails paleontological and geologic fieldwork in areas such as the North American continental interior, Argentina, Turkey, Spain, and China, laboratory work, as well as systematic, statistical, and phylogenetic analysis. Many of these projects involve international collaborators including from Duke University, Geologic Survey of Turkey, Utrecht University, Netherlands, University of Birmingham, UK, University of Helsinki, Finland, and National Museum of Natural Science, Madrid, Spain. |
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 Photo by Caroline Strömberg |
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Origin, early diversification, and biogeography of the grass clade Grasses evolved in the Late Cretaceous, in parallel with the break-up of Gondwana. It is less clear how this species-rich and ecologically important group reached its current global distribution and what the earliest interactions with herbivores were. My research on grass phytoliths preserved in coprolites from the Late Cretaceous of India with colleagues at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany, Lucknow and the Panjab University, Chandigarh attempts to address these questions. Ecology of Late Cretaceous angiosperms During 2007, I will be a Smithsonian Institution Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Scott Wing, studying macrofossil floras to investigate habitat structure in Late Cretaceous ecosystems in mid-latitude North America and the role of angiosperms.
PUBLICATIONS
2007 Strömberg, C.A.E. and Zhang, Z., in press. Neogene climatic and biotic changes in Eastern Eurasia: Preface. Vertebrata PalAsiatica. Strömberg, C.A.E., Friis, E.M., Liang, M.-M., Werdelin, L., and Zhang, Y-l., in press. Palaeoecology of an Early-Middle Miocene lake in China: preliminary interpretations based on phytoliths from the Shanwang Basin. Vertebrata PalAsiatica. Strömberg, C.A.E., in press. Can slide preparation methods cause size biases in phytolith assemblages?: Results from a preliminary study. In Madella, M., Zurro, D. and Jones, M. K. (eds.): Places, People and Plants: Using Phytoliths in Archaeology and Palaeoecology. Oxbow Books. 2006 2005 Strömberg, C.A.E., 2005. Decoupled taxonomic radiation and ecological expansion of open-habitat grasses in the Cenozoic of North America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A.102(34): 11980-11984. 2004 Strömberg, C.A.E., and Feranec, R.S., 2004. The evolution of grass-dominated ecosystems during the late Cenozoic: Preface. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 207(3-4): 199-201. 2003 2002 1997 |
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