Thank you, Rosalie!

 

20 Years OSTRACON

The first message on OSTRACON was sent Wed, 25 Oct 1995 6:01:45 (UTC) by Roger L. Kaesler. After several "test"-posts the list was alive ever since. It was Rosalie Maddocks who brought the idea to the attention of ostracod workers at the early years of internet and is managing and owning the list ever since.

A laudatio:

Professor Rosalie Maddocks

She has had a very productive career in the study of Ostracoda producing about 80 scientific publications from journal articles to chapters and full monographs.  She has also authored and coauthored a similar number of abstracts presented at numerous scientific symposia and meetings.  She has been an outstanding educator in paleobiology and the taxonomy of Ostracoda at the University of Houston since 1967.   I recall when I had my first course from Dr. Maddocks in 1973, she was already well started in her career of publishing excellent papers on Ostracoda in the University of Kansas Paleontological Contributions, Crustaceana, the Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology, and a United States National Museum Bulletin.   Her taxonomic contributions to difficult groups such as bairdiids, macrocyprids and pontocyprids still stand as classics.  She also began her life-long volunteer efforts to help edit many papers on Ostracoda.

More importantly to students of Ostracoda was the enormous amount of energy and passion she brought to meetings, the classroom, the field, and to her microscope.   Her classes were well planned and packed with mountains of useful information.   Outside of the classroom in those early years and later we were fortunate to have her lead us on field trips at least once per month to classic type localities across the Texas and Louisiana coastal plains.  Those early collections were just the start of a collection that now stands at thousands of accessioned outcrop, core and well samples.

In 1982, Rosalie Maddocks hosted the 8th International Symposium on Ostracoda at the University of Houston.  This outstanding meeting included important papers on the Cretaceous-Paleogene (Tertiary) contact in Texas along the Brazos River.   Additionally, current papers discussing the applications of ostracodes across the globe and through time were included.   Field trips were organized to the K/P boundary as well as other Paleozoic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene and Recent collecting localities.  This meeting is also the first that I recalled having a significant number of delegates from China.  At one outcrop the Chinese delegates were flabbergasted when the Texan land owner began speaking in Mandarin.  Apparently, he was correcting someone’s grammar.   The Houston ISO proceedings volume and the field trip guidebook are lasting legacies for the ostracode community.

The concept of the OSTRACON Listserv was first discussed in July, 1994, at an IRGO meeting.   One may also recall from CYPRIS Number 13, 1995, pages 78-80, that Rosalie Maddocks described numerous new internet and electronic options including a Listserv that eventually became the home of OSTRACON.   That volume of CYPRIS was published in July of 1995.    Then in October of 1995 the OSTRACON Listserv went public.  Since that time, many useful discussions have occurred as well as some chatter but together the pulse of IRGO lives through the conversations that found a welcoming venue in OSTRACON.   Through the years Rosalie Maddocks has patiently assisted those trying to begin with OSTRACON or like so many times in my career, to help us remember what she has already explained. 

Don Van Nieuwenhuise
With contribution from Tom Cronin

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Thank you, Rosalie for setting up OSTRACON 20 years ago! It is a lifeline for the ostracod community as it was from the beginning. The listserver is nourished by messages from ostracod enthusiast of all stages and from all continents. Students starting their first ostracod project. Scientists promoting their latest manuscript. Colleagues asking for publications. Citizen scientists requesting different methods. IRGO officers asking for attention. CYPRIS editors calling for contributions. And incautious colleagues chitchatting. Personally, OSTRACON is one reason why I started and continued ostracod research, because it gives access to the whole research community working on ostracods.

Finn Viehberg, University of Cologne, Germany
current Chair of IRGO

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Without doubts, setting up OSTRACON in 1995 was visionary! It quickly prooved to be an excellent tool for collaborations on all levels. OSTRACON teared down walls and borders, thank you Rosalie!

Renate Matzke-Karasz, LMU Munich, Germany
current Chair of SF*IRGO

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OSTRACON has been very important since my graduate student time ~15 years ago. OSTRACON has been working very well, given friendly atmosphere of ostracode research community. When I needed any references or have any questions, somebody helped me quickly and thoughtfully. Thank you very much for your constructing such excellent framework. This mailing list makes us ostracode researchers closer friends, I think.

Moriaki Yasahura, The University of Hong Kong

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OSTRACON is, especially for early career scientists, an ideal platform for networking and communication. It is an extremely efficient  way to answer research questions and for solving methodological problems. I am always very grateful whenever a querist summarizes the answers he/she had received and sends them over the list back to the community.

Antje Schwalb, Technical University Braunschweig

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As an 83 yr. old retired teacher and micropalaeontologist, I have a very special reason to be thankful for my longstanding membership of OSTRACON. An SEM I took of a Riversleigh Middle Miocene ostracod showed evidence of soft-part preservation. As a taxonomist of Miocene Australian ostracod faunas, I have very little background in Recent specimens and the biology of the ostracod. An enquiry on OSTRACON for a colleague with these kinds of expertise led to the development of email exchanges involving Renate (no need for a surname!) and Robin Smith of Lake Biwa Museum, Japan (equally well-known, I am sure). The outcome was the discovery via the ESRF synchrotron and its team of workers of fossilised sperm and sub-cellular preservation of organelles. This was a world first (at the time) and resulted in a paper in the Royal Society Proceedings.
It also resulted in a warm and continuing rrelationship with these colleagues on the other side of the world. Bravo OSTRACON and Rosalie Maddocks, whom I met at several IRGO conferences beginning after my retirement in 1988.

John Neil, La Trobe University

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Dear Rosalie,
The anniversary of Ostracon must be something like a second birthday for you. And we all join in, not only with the use of this valuable tool, which made the life of ostracodologists much easier, but also in the good wishes for the next 20 years of Ostracon and good health to you.

Avi Honigstein, Geological Survey of Israel

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I ‘m joining the proud users of OSTRACON to say: thanks Rosalie Maddocks! OSTRACON is the real linkage among ostracodologists! We (ostracodologists) are researchers coming from the most disparate fields of science, and probably the only global interaction among us is precisely OSTRACON.

Julio Rodriguez-Lazaro, UPV/EHU, Bilbao

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When I first started working with ostracods almost 15 years ago (oh damn already…) one of the first things I did was to sign in on OSTRACON and I never regretted it! Not only it offered me an easy way to contact the ostracod community or ask for obscure literature, but I always found it fascinating to read about exotic topics way out of my own domain of expertise! So thank you Rosalie for creating this amazing tool that is Ostarcon, how were people doing before?!

Vicent Perrier, University of Lyon

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Ever since I started to use OSTRACON as a PhD student (a long time ago!) until now as a senior researcher, I am convinced that facilitating communication and solving questions through this list has been very valuable to promote progress in ostracod research, particularly for isolated young researchers starting to navigate the ostracod seas. The great colleagues that started up this system with their effort, and offered it to all of us twenty years ago, deserve to be recognized by the rest of the ostracod community, thank you so much!

Paco Mesquita, University of Valencia

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I met OSTRACON in the first week of her life. It was love at first sight! There was instant chemistry and the two became inseparable. Thank you very much for OSTRACON, Rosalie!

João Carlos Coimbra, Unversidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

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Congratulations: 20 years OSTRACON.I remember many interesting and helpful discussions. Many thanks to Prof. Rosalie Maddocks!!!

Burkhard Scharf, Bremen

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Dear Rosalie,
Since many years I enjoy OSTRACON as a platform for reading and/or exchanging messages related to our dear Ostracods (Ostracodes). I found your idea and perennial effort to keep alive on the server of University of Houston this extremely useful intellectual platform, a wonderful achievement. I will explain my feelings with a quotation from Paul Feyerabend, a humanist with unconventional views on what science is and scientists are: “Understanding cannot exist without contact. Contact changes the parties concerned.” OSTRACON is this!
Thank you Rosalie!

Dan L. Danielopol, University of Graz


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Ostracon is an important and wonderful tool for ostracodologists to communicate internationally. It allows quick distribution of new results and new publication or asking questions to get helpful answers and initiate interesting discussions between Palaeontologists and Biologists resp. people studying ostracodes (e.g. Morphology, Biology, Taxonomy, Evolution, Stratigraphy, Ecology, Climate, Palaeogeography, Geodynamics). 

Helga Groos-Uffenorde, Georg-August-University Göttingen


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Thank you for establishing OSTRACON, it is a wonderful place where one can learn a lot, just by reading other questions and comments or get help when asking for advice. If there was no OSTRACON, I would probably not be working on ostracods today.

Tamara Karan-Žnidaršič, University of Belgrade

 

 

 

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