Our team’s objective is to understand how changes in climate, tectonics, and past environments impacted the diversity, composition, and paleoecology of fossil communities throughout the Miocene. We integrate field and specimen-based approaches with methods in analytical paleobiology to investigate relationships between landscape and faunal change across spatial and temporal scales.
- Organismal paleobiology: Using a suite of approaches (e.g., stable isotopes, ecometrics, microwear, functional morphology), we aim to reconstruct the ecology (e.g., diet, locomotion) of past organisms.
- Faunal community analysis: Statistical evaluation of the composition, ecological traits, and turnover of faunal communities across space and time.
- Paleobiodiversity: Analysis of the processes that underlie past species richness patterns in relation to hypothesized climate and landscape drivers. In addition to evolutionary (e.g., speciation and extinction) and biogeographic (e.g., immigration) processes, we also assess potential sampling and taphonomic biases in the fossil record.
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