Researcher
Kaitlin Karins
October 10, 2012

Most little girls when growing up want to be a princess, a dancer or a rock star, but not Bobbi Jo Brace. Then again, she was never thought she was like other girls.
“I always knew I wanted to be a geologist. I grew up in a rural area, and I would play in the dirt and mud all the time. I would find snail shells and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever” Brace said. “I declared my major geology on my first day of college.”
After receiving her Bachelor of Science in Geology from the University of Northern Iowa in 2007, Brace came to the University of Nebraska -Lincoln (UNL) to further her work in the field of nannofossils. UNL is one of only three schools in the United States that offers Calcareous Nannofossil Biostratigraphy which is a specific type of Micropaleontology, the field of studying small fossils that are best studied with a microscope. Brace is now researching the evolution of the calcareous nannofossil genus called Biscutum (a certain strand of coccolithophorids), with David Watkins.
Brace and Watkins have been studying the fossils of coccolithophorids (plankton) together since January of 2011. Coccolithophorids are very small, single-celled plants which evolved approximately 210 million years ago during what is known to geologists as the 'Triassic Period', are still present in today's oceans. When these planktons are alive, they are surrounded by tiny calcite plates that form a sphere around the cell. Upon death, this sphere of plates (called a coccosphere) falls to the sea floor where the plates separate from one another into individual plates.
Biscutum are used to look into the past of the ocean. These planktons can tell researchers how fertile the ocean water was at that time. Were there things living and reproducing in the surface water? Or was it pretty inactive? Then when these planktons die and accumulate on the sea floor, they eventually turn in to oil deposits that we are drilling today.
This type of research is also becoming very important to the oil business. Oil companies use the presence of different species such as Biscutum to date sediment when they are drilling oil wells. Brace says she is not currently working with any one oil company at this time. She does however have a meeting with someone pretty high up in BP (British Petroleum) later this month, but that’s not what drivers her to do this research. Brace is doing it to get the information out there and available.
Zachary Kita, a fellow Nannofossil researcher who is also working on a separate project with Watkins within the same time frame as Braces, says “I think what she is planning to do with Biscutum is very important. It is not a very flashy project, but it is something that will be important to nannofossil workers and to ocean studies.” Biscutum, are part of marine algae that while in the ocean, produce 70-80% of the Earth's oxygen.
Watkins had done some work with the Biscutum during the 80’s himself but most of the original descriptions of Biscutum are very confusing. “Bobbi will be splitting up a group of nannofossils that have been confusing for a long time. This research will