Gildner Home Page

Let's face it  - the reason many of us study the Earth and its history is that it is fascinating. We're all kids in a planet-sized candy store, and if the candy weren't enough, we in paleontology and Earth history also get 4 ½ billion years worth of candy-history. My main goal is to share with people the same wonder and fascination that keeps us all in a constant state of amazement. I want them to see what we see, to appreciate it and to enjoy it.

I have until recently been working in the World Wide Web software industry. In my day job, I help develop web software, by helping with requirements and design and by testing the product before it is released. The combination of the World Wide Web and paleontology is a good one, and here are a few of the things I've done with it...

• Paleontological Research Institution web site - large site promoting both the institution and paleontology, including collections tours and virtual field trips. [site modified since my departure]
• Mohawk Valley Fossils - presents the real-life biostratigraphy and stratigraphy of the Mohawk River Valley of New York [site modified since my departure]
• Evolving natural selection applet - a simple Java 1.0 applet that changes a string of random letters into the word "evolving", using a Natural Selection algorithm.
• Interactive natural selection applet Similar to the Evolving applet, but allows the user (student?) to enter their own word(s), rather than providing one for them.
• Raup coiling model applet A Java implementation of Raup's famous shell coiling model. Student can set W, D, and T using sliders, and display the shell at the click of the mouse.

This page is a bit of that marriage between the WWW and paleontology, too. This page will change subtly and not-infrequently, as I develop new (to me at least) methods for making useful web pages. In this site, you'll find pages that use HTML 4.01, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, and Java. Everything here is fully functional with any W3C-conformant browser. If you have problems with this page, don't blame me - blame your browser!

I also want to instill in people an appreciation of science, and to encourage people to use and trust their minds. The most effective method I have found to do so is to challenge them to think. Ask them questions with no right answer. Ask their reasoned opinions. Let them show themselves that they can do science.

I've been privileged to do so in the classroom at Cornell University and Union College, and in the field for the Paleontological Research Institution, Cornell, the University of Maine, Union College, and most recently at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (or IPFW).

What's a paleontologist doing with a BS in Geophysics? A lot. Someone once said that all you need to know to be a good paleontologist is everything. A background in geophysics has given me the quantitative skills to look at the history of life on earth with a different viewpoint, and that has allowed me to see things in a different light.

I'm currently working on the mathematical description of ammonite suture patterns using Fourier series. The problem has been tackled by many before (including me), without success. I've found a way to do it, and I'm pursuing ways to take advantage of the technique to study these extinct organisims. Among the other uses, the method allows the reconstruction of suture patterns via the Internet, with more accuracy and more efficiently than previously possible. The results of the analyses can be used for determining similarity between suture patterns (and therefore species) and providing a measure of the suture patterns' complexity. The method opens new ways to think about suture patterns - the limits of these avenues will not be known until they are explored, but here's an abstract of the oral presentation presented at the GSA Annual Meeting, November 15, 2000, and here's the article in Palaeontolgia Electronica.

This section shows some left-overs from years past. For example, a student of mine and I found that trilobite cranidia can be used as paleocurrent indicators, contrary to the implications of the published literature. This is a paper seeking a publisher!

I have never been short of curiosity, and a lot of things interest me. One result is the image above, taken on a synchrotron. Why a synchrotron? Because you can tune the frequencies of the x-rays produced, and process the images to show more detail. I'm interested in broadening our understanding of the fossil record, by new ways of seeing things and new ways of analyzing what we've seen.

My mathematical modeling work on sediment accumulation and the stratigraphy, begun as my dissertation, is on hold. The results indicated that epeiric seas could indeed have been maintained as extremely broad, extremely shallow bodies of water, much as Shaw and as Irwin discussed three decades ago. Such an interpretation has interesting paleoecological and evolutionary consequences. Applied to the Galena Group (upper Middle Ordovician; Upper Mississippi River Valley), time-correlation of stratigraphic sections separated by 100's of km predicted the location of bentonites to within 4 cm.