A Slippery Rock University faculty member is at the forefront of paleontology and forward-thinking research that is informed by the past. Fabian Hardy, an SRU assistant professor of environmental geosciences, is conducting engaging research into the connections between the evolutionary adaptations of pronghorns and changes to their environment during the Miocene Epoch.
This research illuminates the ways that organisms and environments related to one another in the past, while also offering new lines of inquiry regarding how human beings and modern pronghorns can cohabitate in the midst of increasing development of the areas in which these animals live.
Hardy’s research, first conducted when he was a post-doctoral researcher and doctoral student at the University of Michigan, analyzes the dimensions of fossil astragali, joints that are important for pronghorns’ hindlimb movement. Observation of the nature of these bones in specimens of different ages allowed Hardy and his research collaborator Anne Kort to suggest that pronghorns are predisposed to high-speed movement from one area of tree cover to another, and that environmental change likely did not have a significant impact on the evolution of the animals’ astragali.
Hardy and Kort also used ecometric analysis, a process that allows researchers to gather how a creature may have moved and other pieces of ecological information in order to develop the fossil record.
Hardy, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in geoscience from the University of Nevada Las Vegas before getting his Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Science from the University of Michigan, had a somewhat roundabout journey into his field of paleontology.
“I was a kid who loved dinosaurs, but like most kids turned 10 and forgot them,” Hardy joked. “So, in college, I bumped around between different majors until I had a really great professor in a geology class who became a really great mentor. From there, I got interested in dinosaurs again and then moved onto studying mammals which is what I do today.”
Hardy is also passionate about his own role as a science educator, emphasizing the importance of skills that science fosters in everyday life. “I tell students who are interested in doing what I do to get good at collaborating,” Hardy said. “You need other peoples’ expertise to help you to accomplish a goal, and you also need the ability to think critically and to learn to draw on your experiences to interpret all of the information that you receive from these different people. I feel that goes beyond science. It helps you in daily life—in interpreting the news, in everything.”
Hardy, like many paleontologists, acknowledges the allure of dinosaurs, but he maintains that ancient and extinct mammals have important things to tell us about our past and present that are much harder to glean from studying dinosaurs. They can tell a story about the connection between organisms and ecosystems across time.
“When it comes to mammals, we can look to the modern mammals that we have nowadays, most of which have roots in the Miocene,” Hardy said. “In looking at the earlier versions of these mammals, I’m interested in how fossils can tell us about the habitat of an animal, the environment and the community that they existed in, because they’re not isolated creatures. We all exist in this ecosystem, and that’s the exciting stuff.”
More information about environmental geosciences at SRU is available on the program’s webpage. Hardy’s research article about pronghorns can be accessed through the Journal of Mammalogy’s website.
