Around 252 million years ago, life on Earth came terrifyingly close to annihilation. The Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction (PTME), often called The Great Dying, wiped out up to 90% of marine animal species. Coral reefs collapsed. Complex food webs unravelled. Entire ecosystems that had flourished for millions of years disappeared. But extinction is only half the … More After Earth’s Darkest Hour: Did Life Really “Recover” from the Permian–Triassic Mass Extinction?

The past two months have been a whirlwind of vivas and celebrations. I could not be prouder to share that Amy Shipley, Lydia Woods, Charlotte Clay and Kate Simpson have all passed their PhD vivas with flying colours. Each of them impressed their examiners enormously, and each has produced a thesis that makes a genuine … More Four Vivas, Four Triumphs: Celebrating Amy, Lydia, Charlotte and Kate

DeepBio@Leeds PGRs Amy Shipley and Lydia have published a review on the sixth mass extinction, as part of a working group on Cenozoic extinctions led out of the Anthropocene Biodiversity Centre at the University of York. The review is published in Global Change Biology. “The Greatest Extinction Event in 66 Million Years? Contextualising Anthropogenic Extinctions” … More New paper by Amy Shipley and Lydia Woods

DeepBio@Leeds PhD student Kate Simpson tells us how her research brings together palaeontology and poetry to conceptualise mass extinction and geological timescales.

PhD project @ British Antarctic Survey on The effects of climate cooling on the evolution of Antarctic Eocene seafloor ecosystems now open for applications. Follow the link below for more details:

The group have just returned from an excellent 68th Annual Meeting of the Palaeontological Association in Erlangen, Germany, with Baran Karapunar, Amy Shipley, Lydia Woods, Kate Simpson, Euan Malpas Vernon, Annabel Nicholls, Lila Blake and Alex Dunhill all making the trip to Bavaria. The conference featured a special symposium of invited talks on “Extinction”, including … More DeepBio@Leeds @ #PalAss24 in Erlangen

Congratulations to lab member Baran Karapunar and former lab member Bethany Allen (now at ETH Zurich) for getting there Paleosynthesis workshop PRIME – Prediction and Identification of Mass Extinctions – workshop funded. What’s PRIME all about? Extinctions are a fundamental part of evolution, but high numbers of extinctions in a relatively short period of time … More PRIME – Prediction and Identification of Mass Extinctions workshop

PhD Project: Antarctic Eocene sea-floor ecosystem structure in response to environmental change Lead Institution: British Antarctic Survey (BAS)Lead Supervisor: Dr Rowan Whittle, BAS, Palaeoenvironments, Ice and Climate ChangeCo-Supervisor: Daniela Schmidt, University of Bristol, School of Earth SciencesCo Supervisor: Saurav Dutta, BASCo-Supervisor: Alex Dunhill, University of LeedsCo-Supervisor: James Witts, Natural History MuseumProject Enquiries: james.witts1@nhm.ac.uk Webpage: https://www.bas.ac.uk/project/the-evolution-and-ecology-of-antarctic-sea-floorcommunities/#about Project aims … More PhD project @ British Antarctic Survey

A warm welcome to 2x new postgraduate researchers to the DeepBio@Leeds group! Welcome (back) Annabel Nicholls! — Annabel was a research assistant in DeepBio@Leeds from June’23 to April ’24 and returns on a NERC Panorama DTP scholarship to study “A predator-prey arms race in the Mesozoic ocean”. She’ll be supervised by me (i.e. Dr Alex … More Welcome Annabel Nicholls and Lila Blake!

Two new papers from the group in the past week to report on… 1. Alex Dunhill and a team of palaeobiologists and ecologists publish a research article in Nature Communications presenting evidence that secondary extinction cascades were important during a Jurassic hyperthermal extinction event and that it took over 7 million years for community structure … More 2x new papers published in a week