Julia Allison Clarke is an American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who studies the evolution of birds and the dinosaurs most closely related to living birds. She is the John A. Wilson Professor in Vertebrate Paleontology in the Jackson School of Geosciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Contents
Education
Clarke graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Geobiology from Brown University in 1995. She went on to study at Yale University, earning a Ph.D. from the Department of Geology and Geophysics in 2002.
Career
In 2005, Clarke led a research team that reexamined a fossil discovered within the rocks of Vega Island in the Antarctic in 1992. Computer tomography (CT) scans allowed for a more detailed analysis of the partial skeleton than had been possible earlier. It was determined to be Vegavis iaai, an extinct Antarctic bird and early relative of ducks and geese and thought to be the only species of modern bird to have lived at the time of the dinosaurs.
Clarke also studied the voice organ (syrinx) of a fossil originally found in 1992. The findings by Clarke and other researchers were published in the science journal Nature.
Fossils of the ancient bird Inkayacu were first discovered in 2008, on the Pacific coast of Ica, Peru. A nearly complete skeleton was uncovered in the Paracas National Reserve by a team led by Rodolfo Salas and studied by a team led by Clarke. This was the first recovered fossil with feathers attached to it. The feathers were preserved enough such that Liliana D'Alba and Ali J. Altamirano were able to perform a novel analysis of the melanosomes, which have the melanin pigment which gives color to the feathers. This research on the nanostructure of ancient feathers was novel. Large penguins, including the species Perudyptes devriesi and Icadyptes salasi, had been described from the area the previous year.