Paleontology journal publishes biology student and faculty member's research

For the first time in her collegiate career, University of North Georgia (UNG) rising senior Elizabeth Noble wrote a research paper not for class but for publication. It was published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

"It was amazing to see it," said Noble, who is pursuing a degree in biology. "It got accepted in December and we worked with editors on revisions since then. It was nice to see it because I've been waiting so many months."

Noble wrote the paper with Dr. David Patterson, assistant professor of biology at UNG, and a team of other students from the UNG SCALE lab. It was titled "Enamel isotopes reveal late Pleistocene ecosystem dynamics in southeastern North America" and focused on the ecosystem inhabited by 20,000-year-old mammoths and long-horned bison excavated near Brunswick, Georgia.

"We used the enamel from a tooth of a mammoth to establish what the ecosystem was like based on the kind of vegetation that was there at the time," said Noble, who explained she washed and processed the samples Patterson found during a fossil dig in summer 2019.

The 21-year-old from Alpharetta, Georgia, said the paper and research experiences at UNG will help her get into graduate school.

"I would like to get a Ph.D., and my end goal is to be a professor and do research like Dr. Patterson," she said.