Exploring the vital sense of smell

Impact Seed Funding for Early Career Researchers

Emerging researcher Dr Alice Clement is an evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist with an interest in early vertebrates during the Devonian period - 400 million years ago when fish moved out of water and onto land.

At Flinders University she leads the research into fossil brain evolution, known as palaeoneurology.

“I study fish and tetrapods - our first land-based ancestors – and in particular the changes that occurred in their bodies over deep geological time,” says Dr Clement.

To understand what the brains of the first tetrapods looked like, Dr Clement needed to visit international museums that held early fossil lungfish – to then compare with lungfish of today.

She says that understanding how lungfish brains have changed through evolution provides an indication of which senses were more important than others.

To achieve this crucial part of her first independent study, Dr Clement was fortunate to receive a donor-funded Impact Seed Funding for Early Career Researchers grant that enabled her overseas travel and access to relevant scanning equipment.

“I would like to wholeheartedly thank the donor community for their support. The Impact Seed Funding grant helped secure my position at the forefront of the burgeoning field of palaeoneurology,” says Dr Alice Clement.

“At the Berlin Natural History Museum, it was extraordinary to see the original specimen of a lungfish (Chirodipterus wildungensis), the first to be described as having an internal space for the brain.”

In Beijing Dr Clement visited the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of China, a repository for fossils, including many very significant fossils relating to the fish-tetrapod transition.

Using modern scanning and imaging techniques such as CT, synchrotron and neutron imaging, she was able to investigate fossils alongside animals in our current environment.

“My main research findings were that in lungfish brain evolution we see the greatest amount of variation in the olfactory region, suggesting that sense of smell has remained a vital sense for these animals throughout their evolutionary history.”

While overseas Dr Clement also made important connections with international researchers – critical to her career development and the advancement of her research.

She says, “The field of palaeoneurology is very small and it was pivotal for me to meet other experts working in the field, such as Tuo Qiao and Jing Lu from China.”

As well as presenting at conferences and publishing the research results, Dr Clement has since received major funding through the Australian Research Council – which she attributes to the stepping-stone the Impact Seed Funding grant provided.

“The seed funding gave me confidence to continue to strive for research independence and to progress my career.”

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^{Published September 2023. Author: Lynda Allen.}

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