Ellie Defty has joined the Palaeo@Leeds group as a Palaeontological Association (PalAss) Undergraduate Bursary summer intern. Ellie’s project is entitled “Lilliput sharks and marine apex predators of the Permo-Triassic” and she will be investigating body size patterns in chondrichthyans across the Permo-Triassic mass extinction and recovery interval.
Ellie’s project will involve applying a variety of statistical techniques to a large global data set of chondrichthyan occurrences from the Paleobiology Database from which she will generate body size time series. She will test the hypothesis that extreme global warming in the Early Triassic led to smaller “Lilliput” lineages of sharks and rays and whether the body sizes of these predatory organisms returned to those seen in the Permian by later in the Triassic or whether they were replaced as apex predators by newly evolved groups of marine reptiles.
Ellie will work with myself, Lydia Woods and Amy Shipley during her time in the Palaeo@Leeds group.
DeepBio@Leeds 
