Research Projects

To me, paleontology is, first and foremost, a discovery-based science. As such, before we can ask any of the big "why" questions, I believe that we have to first answer some of the "whats". The Paleogene, the period immediately following the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, is a time defined by the presence of many enigmatic, extinct groups of mammals of unresolved affinities. Much of my doctoral work is focused on describing new species and performing parsimony-based and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses to recover the relationships these taxa to other extinct and extant mammals. Furthermore, I use simple and multivariate statistics to address questions like whether or not these extinct mammals exhibited sexual dimorphism, or if individuals living in high altitudes displayed unique morphologies. Most of my research focuses on uintatheres (basal ungulates?), plagiomenids (a group proposed to have dermopteran affinities), and apheliscids (purported stem-macroscelidians). 

As global temperatures continue to rise at an unprecedented rate, understanding the ways organisms responded to global climate change in the past becomes essential if we hope to predict how the Earth's biota may respond now and in the future. As such, past climatic events provide unique insights into the ways climate change can affect life on Earth. About 56 million years ago, the planet experienced a dramatic bout of worldwide warming, with the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases causing global temperatures to spike by 5-8 degrees Celsius within the span of just a few millennia (sound familiar?). This event has been linked to a distinct faunal turnover event in Western North America, with archaic mammalian clades experiencing a decline coincident with the emergence of several modern groups (primates, perissodactyls, and artiodactyls, to name a few).  However, the mechanisms underlying this turnover event remain poorly understood. I am modeling clade-level rates of speciation and extinction, as well as potential and realized niche spaces, to determine how and why the faunal composition of Western North America changed during this interval of worldwide climate change.

As a member of the Beard Lab, I am extremely fortunate to conduct fieldwork in and have access to fossils from a number of Eocene-aged sites in Turkey. During the Eocene, Turkey was part of an archipelago system known as Balkanatolia, and I have been working with one of our post-baccalaureate researchers, Johan Knoff, to produce the first description of the herpetofauna from this assemblage. Furthermore, I am interested in using morphology-based phylogenetic methods to model the evolution, speciation, and dispersal of different taxa across this ancient island system.