Jessica A. Maisano
The University of Texas at Austin
Jackson School of Geosciences
1 University Station, C-1100
Austin, TX 78712-0254
U.S.A.

Jessica A. Maisano is a Research Associate at the High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Yale in 2000, working with J. Gauthier on postnatal skeletal development in squamates (lizards, snakes, amphisbaenians). Jessie came to UT Austin as a postdoctoral fellow on DigiMorph.org, the Digital Library of Morphology and remains involved with this project. Since 2004 she has been collaborating with J. Gauthier, M. Kearney, T. Reeder, O. Rieppel, J. Sites, and J. Wiens on Deep Scaly, the NSF Assembling the Tree of Life project for squamates. They have scanned approximately 200 living and extinct squamate taxa for that project, using the same technology employed here for Caprinuloidea perfecta. Jessie’s research focuses on the skeletal morphology of lizards. Of particular interest are ‘extra-skeletal’ systems (e.g., osteoderms, endolymphatic system) and the postnatal development of the skeleton (e.g., secondary centers, sesamoids, terminal fusions), which she investigates using a combination of cleared-and-double-stained specimens and high-res CT.