![\"Juliana](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/106\/2020\/05\/juliana_long.jpg?resize=993%2C541&ssl=1\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
University of Detroit Mercy junior Juliana Jakubczak didn\u2019t know what she was getting into when she joined Associate Professor of Biology Nizar Ibrahim\u2019s student research team. All she knew was that Ibrahim was a paleontologist and studying fossils was something she had been interested in since she was a child.<\/p>\n
Fast forward two years and Jakubczak is a co-author on Ibrahim\u2019s groundbreaking article in the prestigious journal Nature, which showed Spinosaurus was aquatic and used tail-propelled swimming locomotion to hunt for prey. It\u2019s the first time such an adaptation has been reported in a dinosaur.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s extremely exciting,\u201d Jakubczak said. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of crazy to say I was a part of this and I helped out. I\u2019m just kind of in shock.<\/p>\n
\u201cDr. Ibrahim is such an amazing professor and amazing research advisor,\u201d Jakubczak added. \u201cIt\u2019s just been a pleasure to be a part of this team and all the amazing people who worked on this. He\u2019s really like the modern day Indiana Jones. He totally embodies that, but is way, way more knowledgeable than Indiana Jones.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jakubczak knew Ibrahim was working on something big when she joined the team, but she didn\u2019t have any idea the research would trend worldwide on Twitter when it was released in April and be covered by major media outlets like CNN, The New York Times, FOX News, ABC News, Popular Science and NPR, just to name a few.<\/p>\n
![\"University](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/106\/2020\/05\/juliana1.jpg?resize=400%2C483&ssl=1\")
\u201cI had no idea how huge this was going to be,\u201d Jakubczak said. \u201cIt\u2019s still kind of shocking. It was a childhood dream because when I was really young I wanted to be a paleontologist. He definitely made it clear when I first joined team that this is big and I couldn\u2019t talk about it at all. I took that very seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now that the paper has been published, Jakubczak is enjoying telling her family and friends about her work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure I\u2019ve talked my family\u2019s ear off because we\u2019re all stuck together in quarantine,\u201d Jakubczak said. \u201cThey\u2019re getting the full presentation here. They just thought I was looking at bones. They think it\u2019s really cool. They\u2019re happy for me because it\u2019s kind of me living out my childhood dream.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jakubczak\u2019s job was to do detailed literature research trying to find out how animals move through water with their tails.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a pretty daunting task to go through the technical literature in a field that you\u2019re not necessarily very familiar with,\u201d Ibrahim said. \u201cBut I had a constant supply of new interesting papers coming in so we assembled a pretty good set of background papers and possible approaches. I wasn\u2019t sure how easy it would be for someone to do who has little exposure to paleontology. She fully met our expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ibrahim said Jakubczak showed an interest in dinosaurs right away so that\u2019s why he chose her for this task.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was interested in doing something on dinosaurs and I said, \u2018Most of the really interesting dinosaur material is actually not here, it\u2019s in Morocco.\u2019 But there\u2019s certainly opportunity to do some detailed literature research, so that\u2019s how it kind of started off,\u201d Ibrahim said. \u201cOf course, at the time it was impossible to predict this would be published in the world\u2019s top scientific journal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jakubczak admitted there were some long days going through literature, but she also had a great time seeing the research progress over time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI loved seeing the tail get developed because we had so many theories of what it might look like,\u201d Jakubczak said. \u201cIt was really, really exciting once we got all the bones scanned in digitally. Over time the bones deform and kind of bend, Dr. Ibrahim had a colleague scan them all and reshape them to what they would have been like when they were living and before all the distortion. That was my favorite part.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jakubczak will be a senior at Detroit Mercy in the fall and hopes to attend dental school after she earns her bachelor\u2019s degree. But she also hopes to continue doing work with fossils.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope to have my own dental practice, but on the side I want to work with dinosaur teeth,\u201d Jakubczak said. \u201cIt\u2019s something I\u2019m interested in. Dr. Ibrahim would bring in not just the Spinosaurus, but other teeth. I would look at them and try to figure out what species it came from, what it ate and things of that nature.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
University of Detroit Mercy junior Juliana Jakubczak didn\u2019t know what she was getting into when she joined Associate Professor of Biology Nizar Ibrahim\u2019s student research …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":4694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[6],"tags":[100,876,233,886,459,1504,2754,454,2752,2751,1481,1482,369,187,873,2753],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/106\/2020\/05\/juliana_long.jpg?fit=1920%2C1047&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbwnTV-1dG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4692"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4695,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4692\/revisions\/4695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.udmercy.edu\/campusconnection\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}