Profile

I live in West Sussex with my partner who is just finishing training as a physiotherapist.

I was born in a small town in France and always dreamt to become an archaeologist or a palaeontologist (because dinosaurs are the best!!), to be able to travel all around the world and discover new things. I graduated with a Bachelor in History and Archaeology in France, spending my third year in York as an Erasmus student to learn English… and fell in love with the country and the language, so decided to stay another year to complete a Master’s degree in Archaeology. I then went back to France to do another degree and worked in museums until I came back to the UK five years ago to complete a PhD (which I submitted 4 months ago, whooop!).

I love travelling and discovering news places (which I get to do with my job, going to places like Africa, Israel, or Irak), and am addicted to TV series of any kind, and to any version of the real TV show ‘Survivor’ (from any country!).

In my spare time I love swimming, listening to movie soundtracks, and writing short fictional stories that no one will ever read! I recently started learning to play the violin (and my neighbours hate me for it!).

For my PhD, I studied the diet of African antelopes which lived about 3 million years ago in Africa. These antelopes (called impala – see images below) belong to a species that still exist today and that are able to survive in various environments because they can feed from a lot of different plants depending on what is available to them.

Because these antelopes are so adaptable, I studied their diet in the past as a way to understand in what kind of environments they were living. This is important because that region of Africa (the Turkana basin, in Kenya/Ethiopia) used to be inhabited as well by human ancestors such as Australopithecus (Lucy – see image below), Homo erectus and Homo habilis. Understanding past environments helps us understand our ancestors, and the influence of environmental change on Human Evolution.

To study the diet of these antelopes, I studied their teeth in details.

For example, I used a powerful microscope to look at the microscopic traces that the food they ate left on their teeth. To be able to do that, I went to museums in Africa to make moulds of the teeth surface, which I then brought back to Europe to be studied. I used a 3D microscope to be able to see and measure all of the tiny traces that were left on the teeth: when they ate a lot of grass, we could see lots of fine scratches on the enamel. When they ate more leaves, fruits or seeds, we could see random scratches and tiny pits on their teeth.

I also looked at the chemistry of their teeth by collecting a bit of enamel that I then analysed using a mass-spectrometer. This machine allows to analyse the composition of the enamel, which is influenced by what the animals were eating when their teeth were forming. It is called stable isotope analysis. I looked at the carbon content (which is influenced by the carbon content of the plants being eaten) and at the oxygen content of their diet (which is influenced by the oxygen content of the water they drink, which varies depending on the water sources but also on the air temperature at the time).

To better understand the relationship between what the antelopes eat and their environment, I also studied the diet of modern antelope populations and then looked at satellite images of their habitats to see what kind of plants were available in their environment.

There would be several types of typical day.

1- Typical day: project planning

At the beginning of the project, a typical day would be to research information and scientific papers about the sites or species I am studying, to build my own research questions and prepare each step of my project.

2- Typical day: data collection

Then I would have several weeks of data collection, often requiring to travel to museums where the fossil collections are being stored and protected. When travelling long distance and with limited time, I would go with a colleague to help me with my work. A typical day would then be: travelling to the museum, select the bones/teeth that I want to study that day, take notes and measurements for each specimen and prepare all the labels/samples bags I will need to collect my data. I would then clean all the specimens from dirt/museum glue residues, before making moulds or taking samples from the specimens.

3- Typical day: sample analysis

But data collection doesn’t stop there! Once all of my samples and moulds collected, these need to be analysed. For that, I would need to go to a laboratory to use specific equipment, such as 3D microscopes (I went to France for 2 months for this) or a mass-spectrometer (I spent a few weeks in various laboratories in the UK to do this). A typical day then would be to go to that lab, and spend 9-10 hours scanning moulds with the microsocope or prepare tiny samples to go into the mass-spectrometer…. and then let the machines (and the lab specialists sometimes) work their magic!

4- Typical day: data analysis and interpretation

Once all of these steps are done, every day is dedicated to analysing the data, run statistical analyses, read papers from other researchers… to help understand the information collected and see if we can answer our research question. A typical day would then involve drinking a lot of coffee, stare at the numbers, curse at the computer when it crashes, and run victory laps around the office when you think you have interesting results!