Description of research and teaching

I completed degrees in palaeontology at the University of Bristol at undergraduate and PhD levels. During which I specialised in the evolution and fossil history of proboscideans – the group that contains elephants and their extinct cousins such as mammoths, mastodonts, stegodonts and deinotheres. My further research interests include evolutionary responses of large mammal communities to past shocks to the Earth’s climate. Eager to share these stories with a broader audience, I have conducted palaeontological outreach activities in museums and consulted for several television documentaries.

In sum, my research strives to answer why we have only three species of elephants on Earth today but over 100 species of antelopes, as for much of the past 15 million years outsized mammalian herbivores such as proboscideans, rhinos and giraffes were far more diverse and widespread across the Earth's ecosystems than today. This begs a more fundamental question about the extent to which the biosphere's baseline conditions underwent dramatic upheaval in recent geological history, including the probable role played by the evolutionary development of humans in this process. Complementing my long-term work in reconstructing the evolutionary trajectories of large mammal species and the ecological communities they inhabited, my role as a postdoc under the NEPA project hosted by Dr Juha Saarinen includes an investigation of postcranial osteology in equines and rhinos, to understand how the evolution of their limb bone proportions reflected adaptations to different habitats over the past 15 million years.