ISPH 2025

Our #BIOpast team was there! Huge thanks to the organizers for such an amazing experience 🥳 #PaleoGalicia #Paleomeeting

#isph2025 group photo!

Congratulations to M. Ramon Fritzen, PhD candidate at Flinders University, for winning 2nd place in the @isph2025.bsky.social image competition using a @ansto.bsky.social MCT scan of (Gogo) fossil lungfish bone!

@isph2025.bsky.social Thanks to @justyna Miszkiewicz and team for a fabulous ISPH meeting! @paleohistology

Congratulations to our postdoc @bonehistopath.bsky.social for winning 2nd place of the #isph2025 image competition!

Winners of our palaeohistology image competition #isph2025

1st place: Professor Tim Bromage
Joint 2nd: @bonehistopath.bsky.social & Marcos Ramon Fritzen

It marks a methodological shift from traditional descriptive histology to a quantitative and predictive approach that connects fossil microstructure with the genomic history of vertebrates.

As part of a growing digital dataset, this reconstruction contributes to identifying evolutionary trends in lungfishes through time.

Rather than focusing solely on bone morphology, it enables the quantification of cellular features as big data, allowing statistical analysis and observation of trends in volume and shape variation.

This work highlights the integration of high-resolution imaging, artificial intelligence segmentation, and large-scale data generation in palaeontology.

Applying this principle to fossil taxa offers new insight into genome evolution in early sarcopterygians, linking histological structures to deep-time genomic patterns.

Using a deep learning-based segmentation, individual osteocyte lacunae were digitally isolated from fossilized bone in unprecedented detail. Osteocyte lacuna volume is a recognized proxy for genome size in living vertebrates.

This image presents the first 3D visualization of osteocyte lacunae in a 382 million-year-old lungfish from Australia, Chirodipterus australis, scanned at ANSTO with a voxel size of 0.71 microns.

Marcos Ramon Fritzen won joint 2nd place of our palaeohistology image competition with his image titled "A Deep Time Genomic Window: 3D Visualization of Fossil Lungfish Osteocyte Lacunae" #isph2025

This image captures a fleeting moment in that ongoing war--a testament to both the resilience and vulnerability of the human body.

Under the lens of confocal laser scanning microscopy, this microscopic battlefield is revealed in striking detail: a dry, hostile landscape where infection and healing vie for control. Will the bone recover, or will the pathogens prevail?

Pits, hollows, mountains, and cliffs--not features of an ancient desert, but signs of the body’s struggle against disease. Infected and inflamed, bone becomes a dynamic terrain, reshaped by periosteal growth as the body fights to repair itself.

@bonehistopath.bsky.social won joint 2nd place of our palaeohistology image competition with her image titled "Desert Landscape" #isph2025

Preferred orientations inform on the nature of forces encountered in habitual use of Lucy’s femur in life. A montage of the entire cross section acquired this way revealed a pattern of preferred orientations that are consistent with the loading history of a bipedal human. Field width 600 μm.

In this real color image, green represents collagen oriented perpendicular to the image, and white represents collagen transversely oriented in Haversian systems.

This novel illuminating method generates autofluorescence of the bone matrix, and provides image contrast regarding degrees of birefringent collagen fiber orientations.

After three years of innovation and engineering, I went to Addis Ababa, and with permission from the Ethiopia National Museum, a fracture across the mid-shaft femur was imaged using circularly polarized ultraviolet light.

To achieve the task of researching Lucy’s skeletal microanatomy in the face of these constraints, it was necessary to build a portable confocal scanning optical microscope and perform optical thin section paleohistology.

There exists a class of objects that are rigorously defended from thin section paleohistology and that cannot travel to an imaging workstation for study. One such object is the famous “Lucy”, Australopithecus afarensis, discovered from fossil bearing deposits at Hadar, Ethiopia, 3.0 m.y.

We are pleased to announce the winner of our palaeohistology image competition is Professor Tim Bromage with his image titled "Lucy Fiber Orientation" #isph2025

Last but not least presenter Gilbert Price talking about the palaeontology of Australia #isph2025

@bonehistopath.bsky.social presenting on the progression of histological changes in skeletal lesions caused by treponematosis in an archaeological human sample #isph2025

#FossilFriday #ISPH2025
@isph2025.bsky.social

@drtanyamsmith.bsky.social presenting on inferring stress histories from trace elements, their promises and pitfalls from tooth histology. Referred to the neonatal line as a birth certificate - we love it! #isph2025

@palaeowalker.bsky.social presenting her histotaphonomy work trying to determine wet and dry diagenesis across subfossil and fossil bones from underwater caves #isph2025