Research Interests
Land vertebrates, or tetrapods, include reptiles, birds and mammals, and have a long olutionary istory extending into deep time. Much of our knowledge of the evolutionary assembly of body plans in key living groups comes from the fossil record, which also reveals diverse extinction groups, such as dinosaurs, pterosaurs and marine reptiles that could not be predicted from the study of living species. My group aims to understand the patterns of evolutionary change on long timescales involved in the origins of modern biodiversity, and during changing climatic regimes. We use phylogenetic and time series statistical approaches across the diversity of living and extinct tetrapods to understand where diversity comes from and how evolution interacts with the environment.