The start of a new academic year sees an influx of new researchers to the lab. Welcome Meghan Jenkinson! Meghan is a palaeontologist, based in Earth and Environment, who will be working with Dr Cris Little, myself and colleagues from The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Society, University of Exeter and the British Geological Survey … More Welcome, new lab members!

New paper out in Global and Planetary Change on the rate and magnitude of CAMP volcanism across the TJ extinction event and how it compares with modern anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Anthropogenic-scale CO2 degassing from the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province as a driver of the end-Triassic mass extinction by Manfredo Capriolo, Benjamin J.W.Mills, Robert J.Newton, JacopoDal Corso, … More New paper on TJ extinction volcanism

Congratulations to Dr Bethany Allen and Dr Adam Woodhouse, who have both passed their PhD vivas in the past month! Both Bethany and Adam passed with minimal corrections and are now both set to start postdoctoral roles in Switzerland and the USA later in 2021. Many congratulations to both!

I was delighted to receive the Murchison Fund award for 2020 at the Geological Society of London virtual awards ceremony via Zoom last night. I got the certificate through the post last week and look forward to hanging it in my office once we are allowed back in the building. I just want to thank … More Murchison Fund 2020

The Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting will run as a virtual conference for the first time ever in December 2020. Three members of my lab will be presenting there work as posters, so be sure to check them out if you are a registered delegate. Bethany Allen is presenting a poster called The impact of the … More #PalAss2020

Good news, Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in Extinction Studies funded at University of Leeds. I am delighted to announce that I am part of a new Leverhulme-funded Doctoral Training Programme (DTP) in Extinction Studies that will commence with a first intake of graduate students in September/October 2021. The cross disciplinary programme spans 4 faculties at … More Leverhulme “Extinction Studies” DTP

New paper out in Science Advances by Tianchen He et al. entitled “An enormous sulfur isotope excursion indicates marine anoxia during the end-Triassic mass extinction”. Our study shows that ocean anoxia had a causal role during the end-Triassic mass extinction, further highlighting the similarity between the volcanic greenhouse gas-driven mass extinctions of the Late Palaeozoic-Early … More New paper by He et al.

New paper out in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Haijun Song et al. entitled “Flat latitudinal diversity gradient caused by the Permian–Triassic mass extinction”. Marine biodiversity patterns changed rapidly during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, altering the latitudinal diversity gradient for 5 million years, a study finds. In PNAS: https://t.co/ykCvpkoO1K pic.twitter.com/Wtz4hDYKaA — PNASNews … More New paper by Song et al.

Lab member Bethany Allen published the first part of her PhD work, The latitudinal diversity gradient of tetrapods across the Permo-Triassic mass extinction and recovery interval, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today. The paper focuses on quantifying the latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) across the Permo-Triassic mass extinction when the Earth experienced a rapid … More New paper by Bethany Allen

I was part of a team led by Bethany Allen and Graeme Lloyd that developed an online workshop on sampling bias in the fossil record for the virtual Progressive Palaeontology conference hosted by the University of Leeds in June 2020. The workshop covers downloading and plotting palaeodiversity and sampling data from the Paleobiology Database as … More ProgPal 2020 workshop – sampling bias in the fossil record