Former Bristol Palaoebiology PhD student Dr Fiona Walker (@Fi_pinnata) has published another chapter of her excellent PhD thesis on modelling sampling biases in the fossil record. This time, the paper focuses on how fossil Lagerstatten distort the vertebrate fossil record. The paper is published open access as early view in the journal Palaeontology and is … More New paper from Dr Fiona Walker

I’ve just returned from Munich where I gave a keynote presentation on “Community structure and ecosystem collapse across major extinction events” at the Paläontologische Gesellschaft (PalGes) Annual meeting. Many thanks to Kenneth De Baets, Nussaibah Raja, Carl Reddin, and Uwe Balthasar for the invite to speak in their “Physiology in deep time” session.   I … More #PalGes19

The Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting 14-17 December 2018, University of Bristol We’ve just returned to Leeds from The Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting 2018 in Bristol. It was a fantastic meeting and a huge credit to the organising committee at Bristol Palaeobiology. The group presented three research projects at the conference: A talk on “Modelling extinction … More #PalAss18

Congratulations to School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) 4th year MEnv student Isobel Fortune for being awarded the Geologists’ Association UKOGL Prize for this year for her Masters’ thesis work on “Modelling food webs in the Jurassic Kimmeridge Clay based on allometric body size relationships”. The prize is a cheque for £600, together with an … More Isobel Fortune – Geologists Association Award

New paper by Haijun Song et al. on the recovery from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction in the marine realm published in Science Advances. Based upon an enormous data set of fossil occurrences and functional diversity, the paper shows that animals at high trophic levels, namely pelagic predators (i.e. cephalopods, vertebrates), recovered faster than those at … More New paper on PT recovery!

New paper published in Palaeontology by lab group member Bethany Allen on archosauromorph extinction selectivity across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. Allen, B.J., Stubbs, T.L., Benton, M.J. and Puttick, M.N. 2018. Archosauromorph extinction selectivity during the Triassic-Jurassic mass extinction. Palaeontology. Published online 1 October 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12399 The paper is published online and analyses the traits associated with … More New paper by Bethany Allen!

Thanks to everyone who attended CPEG2018 at the University of Leeds. We hosted over 80 delegates from over 10 countries from as far afield as Australia, the USA and Israel. We saw an excellent variety of ecological talks and posters and hope to have facilitated more crossing of the time gap that spans palaeontology and ecology. We hope … More CPEG2018

A huge (and belated) congratulations to Dr Fiona Walker for graduating from the University of Bristol with a PhD in geology for her thesis “Taxonomic diversity in the fossil record: sampling and real richness” on 16th July 2018. Dr Walker has moved on to a data analytical position in central government since completing her studies. … More Dr. Fiona Walker – Congratulations!

Crossing the Palaeontological-Ecological Gap This summer, CPEG2018 will take place in the School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, 30-31 August 2018. This British Ecological Society, Macroecology Special Interest Group, meeting aims to bring palaeontologists, palaeoecologists and ecologists together to discuss data and methods. For a truly synthetic understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes, … More CPEG2018

Unfortunately, I am unable to attend #PalAss17 due to family reasons. Here is an electronic version of my student’s, Karolina Zarzyczny, poster (click for high res. version), just in case the physical copy doesn’t materialize…