School of Earth Sciences and Engeneering, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
DELTA, Nanjing University’s Geoscience-Paleontology Team aims to document taxonomic, temporal and evolutionary relations among fossil species, infer climate and environmental changes across the Phanerozoic, and develop a framework for understanding how these factors have interacted throughout deep time.
To accomplish this goal we require collaborations with international partners on these and related topics. Our team specializes in quantitative stratigraphy, quantitative morphometry macroevolution, paleogeographic and paleoclimatologic reconstruction as well as data mining, and is in the process of expanding its research scope to more data-driven approaches – including machine learning and artificial intelligence – in the earth sciences. Over the past ten years the team has made significant achievements in digitizing both Chinese and western geoscience data, as well as constructing an advanced earth-science database system, OneStratigraphy (http://onestratigraphy.ddeworld.org/). This database focuses on the integration, management, sharing, visualization and analysis of both stratigraphic and taxonomic data in a geological section-base format, as well as developing tools to integrate and analyze such data from this and other sources. Current team members include Junxuan Fan, Norman MacLeod, Yukun Shi, Shaochun Dong and Hao Huang.
School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
The University of Bristol was founded in 1909, but it grew from a University College that had been founded in 1867, and geology was taught as a distinct subject from the start. Usually for Europe at the time, women were admitted to all courses at Bristol on an equal status to men.
The study of palaeontology has always featured at Bristol, with many distinguished palaeontologists on the staff over the years, including William Sollas, Sidney Reynolds, Arthur Trueman, Stanley Smith, Walter Whittard, and Bob Savage. Michael Benton joined the staff in Bristol in 1989, sharing palaeontology teaching with Derek Briggs. After he moved to Yale University, Phil Donoghue was appointed, then Emily Rayfield, Dani Schmidt, Jakob Vinther, Davide Pisani, and John Cunningham. More details are here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/research/palaeobiology/.
We currently work on three themes that relate to the aims of DELTA, (1) biodiversity through time and fossil record accuracy; (2) mass extinctions; and (3) phylogenetic and other modelling approaches to macroevolution.
Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
The University of Oxford began as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. The study of palaeontology has a long and venerable history at Oxford, including foundational palaeontologists John Phillips and William Buckland. John Phillips was the first to publish both a diversity curve over the Phanerozoic and a global geological time scale, both of relevance to the aims of DELTA. William Buckland wrote the first full account of a dinosaur, named Megalosaurus, among other accomplishments.
Today, two full-time faculty members with interest in the fossil record (Julie Cosmidis and Erin Saupe) are hosted in the Department of Earth Sciences, and four permanent research staff in the Oxford Museum of Natural History (Frances Dunn, Ricardo Perez-de la Fuente, and Paul Smith). Across department, the University supports at least 30 individuals working in palaeobiological and subdisciplines: http://palaeobiology.web.ox.ac.uk.
Today, palaeobiological research at the University of Oxford aims to understand the processes governing biotic change on long timescales, including major evolutionary transitions, such as the origin and early evolution of animals, and how biodiversity responds to environmental change. We approach this research by assessing the assembly of Earth's extant and extinct biodiversity, studied in a rigorous phylogenetic and mathematical framework.
Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, London, UK
Deep time stratigraphy at UCL once implied Mesozoic (a term invented by John Phillips), but now have been added an earlier, biogeochemical dimension. From the origins of life, sex and mitochondria (Nick Lane and Dominic Papineau), early life on land (Martin Homann) to Snowball Earth and the Cambrian explosion (Graham Shields, Ying Zhou, Luke Parry, Sean Chen, Max Telford), UCL now also looks at the first 90% of Earth's history when nothing much happened.
The specific research group led by Graham Shields focusses on the environmental changes that accompanied, and possibly facilitated early biological radiations and diversification. The London Geochemistry and Isotope Centre (LOGIC) was founded in 2015 forms the heart of our operation, with analytical facilities capable of measuring most isotopic and elemental proxies. In recent years, Shields' group has published a wide range of Proterozoic and Cambrian studies using carbon, oxygen, sulphur, nitrogen, strontium, calcium, uranium, molybdenum and lithium isotopes as well as the rare earths. Together with biogeochemical modelling, these studies highlight ocean oxygenation events linked to biological radiations, ocean deoxygenation linked to mass extinctions, and illuminate the long-term coupling between weathering, tectonics, climate and the biosphere. Some target directly Darwin’s dilemma around why animals appeared so abruptly on the scene.
The Earth Sciences Vertebrate Palaeontology research groups are led by Paul Upchurch and Philip Mannion, currently comprising four postdoctoral researchers, eight PhD students, and an average of around six master's students. In the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, Prof. Susan Evans, Dr Ryan Felice and Dr Laura Porro work on the anatomy of a variety of extant and fossil vertebrates, with a particular
focus on amphibians, squamates, dinosaurs and birds, and have a strong track record in areas such as biomechanics. More broadly, London is an excellent place to work as a vertebrate palaeobiologist, with The Natural History Museum (NHM) just 25 minutes away by the underground train system. The museum houses one of the largest and most important collections of extant and fossil vertebrates in the world, and has the largest palaeontology-focused library in Europe. There are numerous collaborations among the vertebrate palaeontologists at UCL, and between them and colleagues at the NHM – many of our PhD students, for example, are jointly supervised by UCL and NHM supervisors. These two institutions are also bound together by a vertebrate palaeontology-focused journal club which meets every two weeks.
With such a large body of researchers, our interests in vertebrate evolution and palaeobiology are highly diverse. Current projects range from studies of individual taxa (e.g. taxon revision and description) through to conservation palaeobiology, biomechanics, and macroevolutionary and macroecological analyses. The fundamental ethos underlying our approach to research is the importance of bridging the gap between fossil discovery/taxonomy/description and the large-scale macroevolutionary analyses that hopefully reveal insights into how the Earth-Life system works. Taxonomic studies alone, with no intention to go beyond documenting anatomy and cataloguing species, would be a rather dry and uninspiring effort that would rightly lead colleagues in other fields to label palaeontology as little more than “stamp collecting”. On the other hand, exciting and apparently important macroevolutionary results are potentially problematic if the underlying data is poorly understood or unreliable. Of course, we are far from being alone in having such an attitude toward palaeontological research, and it is precisely these concerns that mean that large-scale international efforts (such as DELTA) are so important. Such initiatives provide opportunities for both data collation and ‘cleaning’, while simultaneously working towards using the improved data to undertake macroevolutionary analysis. We therefore like to train our early career stage researchers in understanding the relationship between basic essential data and the value they have for investigating evolution once such data have been appropriately organised and analysed.
With such a large body of researchers, our interests in vertebrate evolution and palaeobiology are highly diverse. Current projects range from studies of individual taxa (e.g. taxon revision and description) through to conservation palaeobiology, biomechanics, and macroevolutionary and macroecological analyses. The fundamental ethos underlying our approach to research is the importance of bridging the gap between fossil discovery/taxonomy/description and the large-scale macroevolutionary analyses that hopefully reveal insights into how the Earth-Life system works. Taxonomic studies alone, with no intention to go beyond documenting anatomy and cataloguing species, would be a rather dry and uninspiring effort that would rightly lead colleagues in other fields to label palaeontology as little more than “stamp collecting”. On the other hand, exciting and apparently important macroevolutionary results are potentially problematic if the underlying data is poorly understood or unreliable. Of course, we are far from being alone in having such an attitude toward palaeontological research, and it is precisely these concerns that mean that large-scale international efforts (such as DELTA) are so important. Such initiatives provide opportunities for both data collation and ‘cleaning’, while simultaneously working towards using the improved data to undertake macroevolutionary analysis. We therefore like to train our early career stage researchers in understanding the relationship between basic essential data and the value they have for investigating evolution once such data have been appropriately organised and analysed.
