Origins and evolution of animals
Animals first appear in the fossil record during the Ediacaran time period (631-541 million years ago). It is during the Ediacaran animals evolved some of their most important traits: most obviously large body-size but also tissue-differentiation, mobility, bilateral symmetry and ecosystem engineering (reef-building). The study of Ediacaran organisms is fraught with difficulties because commonly-used morphological approaches have only limited use due to the unique anatomies of Ediacaran organisms. Fortunately, the preservation of Ediacaran fossils is exceptional with thousands of immobile organisms preserved where they lived under volcanic ash. Therefore, the position of the fossil on the rock surface encapsulates their entire life history: how they reproduced and how they interacted with each other and their environment. As such, ecological statistics provides a novel approach for investigating fundamental issues in early animal evolution.
Ecology through deep-time
We are interested in the relationship between evolutionary innovations and ecosystem structure through deep-time. Using ecological network models we consider how the ecosystem structure and stability develop with the introduction of key animal traits, such as mobility, biomineralization and macro-predation. Working on fossil assemblages in the Cambrian, Silurian and Jurassic we are looking at how macro-ecological patterns are related to the evolution of different traits and animal groups impacts ecosystem structure.
Benthic community ecology
A key area of our research is on the dynamics of modern marine benthic community dynamics, identifying the key ecological interactions that drive benthic biodiversity, and understanding how these drivers may change as ecosystems are perturbed both biologically and environmentally. Key to our approach is looking beyond interactions just between pairs of taxa, but understanding how the community interacts as a whole, and how changes cascade through the ecosystem and effect different organisms in different ways. Currently, we are working to understand how tropical benthic communities mature and how these systems are impacted and re-structured by sudden death events such as hurricanes and coral bleaching. Together with colleagues at British Antarctic Survey and Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research we are investigating the spatial structure of Antarctic communities on fine and large scales using newly developed methodologies for the analysis of community ecology. This will enable us to establish key species that underpin benthic community ecology, and the environmental factors that affect Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs).
Life in the Universe
We are not only interested in evolution of life on Earth, but also how life may evolve elsewhere in the Universe. Working with Prof Nikku Madhusudhan in the Institute of Astronomy, we are interested in understanding how life evolves on Hycean exoplanets. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is making major advancements in atmospheric observations of exoplanets. Last year JWST observations led to the first detections of carbon bearing molecules in the atmosphere of a habitable-zone exoplanet K2-18b, a potential Hycean world. Hycean planets are a new class of ocean planets with hydrogen rich atmospheres which significantly expand the habitable zone and biosignature detectability with JWST. A major unknown on this frontier is about the nature of possible life and biological evolution on such planets. Our work is focussed on understanding biological evolution on exoplanets, understanding how evolutionary trajectories will vary with temperature, gravity and on water-only worlds. This work will enable us to make better inferences from exoplanet atmospheres to be able to fully understand if and where there are signs of life.