PLEASE NOTE: Application deadline date 08 Jan 2024. Applications are no longer being accepted for this project
Project Overview
Echinoderms are key ecosystem engineers in many marine ecosystems from deep ocean depths to shallow intertidal habitats. This project will analyse their extensive fossil record to study how their resilience to climate change and mass extinction events has changed through time; using the past to test predictions of future change.
Project Description
Echinoderms are a common, widespread and successful phylum of marine animals with an extensive and well-preserved fossil record. Several groups, including infaunal echinoids and ophiuroids, are critical ecosystem engineers, affecting biogeochemical cycling in modern marine habitats, and predicting their responses to climate change and biodiversity loss is key to understanding how marine ecosystems will function in a warming world. Given their long evolutionary history, echinoderms have experienced many episodes of past climate change and biodiversity loss, at multiple magnitudes and rates of change, including the largest mass extinction events [1,2] and short-term hyperthermals such as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Their fossil record therefore provides a unique dataset documenting their responses and resilience to past change, providing direct empirical evidence of how echinoderm communities were structured and functioned under extreme environmental conditions. Fossil data may thus be used to test predictions of future change [3].
The successful student will collect primary, quantitative palaeoecological data spanning several intervals of past change, focusing on those echinoderm groups and events which most interest them. Samples are available in museum collections, including the NHM, and there is the opportunity to supplement these with the student’s own fieldwork if required.
Fossil data will be interpreted and analysed in an ecological and functional framework to allow comparison between events and with modern studies, enabling the data to be used to test predictions of future change. The results of this project will be of interest to marine ecologists, biologists and conservationists, as well as palaeontologists and evolutionary biologists.
The INSPIRE DTP programme provides comprehensive personal and professional development training alongside extensive opportunities for students to expand their multi-disciplinary outlook through interactions with a wide network of academic, research and industrial/policy partners. The student will be registered at the University of Southampton and hosted at the Natural History Museum, London. Specific training will include: training in the identification and taxonomy of modern and fossil echinoderm groups using dissecting microscopy, SEM, CT-scanning, and thin section analysis; in the collection of quantitative palaeoecological data from museum and field-collected samples, including morphometric measurements and species abundance counts; in the ecological and statistical analysis in R of individual and community-level data; and in the dissemination of science through publication in peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations, and outreach and public engagement.
[1] Thompson, J. R., Hu, S. X., Zhang, Q. Y., Petsios, E., Cotton, L. J., Huang, J. Y., ... & Bottjer, D. J. 2018. A new stem group echinoid from the Triassic of China leads to a revised macroevolutionary history of echinoids during the end-Permian mass extinction. Royal Society Open Science, 5(1), 171548.
[2] Foster, W. J., & Twitchett, R. J. 2014. Functional diversity of marine ecosystems after the Late Permian mass extinction event. Nature Geoscience, 7(3), 233-238.
[3] Calosi, P., Putnam, H.M., Twitchett, R.J., & Vermandele, F. 2019. Marine metazoan modern mass extinction: improving predictions by integrating fossil, modern and physiological data. Annual Review of Marine Science, 11, 369-390.
