Institution: The Open University
Supervisor(s): Dr Tom Stubbs (The Open University)
Dr Luke Mander (The Open University)
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: Tetrapod animals (amphibians, mammals, reptiles, birds) have incredible modern and extinct biodiversity. This is reflected by both species numbers and exceptional variation in morphology and ecology; everything from frogs to dinosaurs. All tetrapods share a basic body plan and many of the same structural skeletal components. Evolutionary processes acting on these flexible components drive variation across geological time and the Tree of Life. This project aims to understand and quantify these processes, with an emphasis on evolutionary flexibility, disparity, directionality, and tempo. More information...
Expiry Date: Sunday, December 31, 2023
Institution: University of Southampton
Supervisor(s): Dr Alexandra Auderset and Dr Tom Ezard, University of Southampton, UK, and Dr Kirsty Edgar, University of Birmingham, UK
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: Everyone knows about coral bleaching, but what about foraminifera bleaching? In this project, you will investigate how the photosymbiotic relationship between the major marine calcifiers, planktic foraminifera and their symbionts changed in response to past global warming and ocean acidification over the past 60 million years (e.g. MMCO, MECO, PETM).
Project Description More information...
Expiry Date: Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Institution: Princeton University
Supervisor(s): Christopher Griffin, Department of Geosciences, Princeton University
Funding Status: Funding is in place for this project
Description: PhD is not tied to a specific project, and is funded via institutional funding (teaching fellowships and research fellowships). The PhD student will have freedom to develop their own project.
More information...
Expiry Date: Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Institution: University of Cambridge
Supervisor(s): Neil Davies (University of Cambridge), Emily Mitchell (University of Cambridge), William McMahon (University of Cambridge), Anthony Shillito (University of Saskatchewan)
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: The Devonian is a key interval of terrestrialization and sedimentary rocks of this age are well represented in the region of NW Europe, rendering it a perfect natural laboratory to assess animal impacts in different environments. Three sites act as case studies (North Devon Basin, England; Orcadian Basin, Scotland; Hornelen Basin, Norway) where underexplored records of trace fossils (burrows, trackways, etc) occur in strata deposited in shallow marine, lacustrine, floodplain soil, and alluvial environments. More information...
Expiry Date: Thursday, January 4, 2024
Institution: University of Cambridge
Supervisor(s): Emily Mitchell, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
Charlotte Kenchington, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: This project will use theoretical models of Ediacaran communities to investigate taxa life-history traits and use these traits to develop dynamic models of Ediacaran eco-evolutionary dynamics to investigate how difference processes influence Ediacaran evolution. In contrast to modern marine systems, the oldest Ediacaran benthic organisms do not interact much with each other, i.e. resource competition, facilitation and mutualisms are relatively limited. Instead, reproductive dynamics appears key to Ediacaran life. More information...
Expiry Date: Friday, January 5, 2024
Institution: University of Liverpool
Supervisor(s): Dr Karl Bates, University of Liverpool
Dr Natalie Cooper, Natural History Museum
Dr Katrina Jones, University of Manchester
Dr James Charles, University of Liverpool
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: Fundamental changes in locomotion underpin many major ecological transitions in vertebrate evolution. Our understanding of how key innovations in the locomotor system drive animal diversity is largely based on the limbs, while the role of the backbone (key to structural support) remains largely unstudied. Previous work has identified gait plasticity as key to ecological diversification in mammals, but the morpho-functional underpinnings of this adaptive release remain unexplained. Crucially, the role of the backbone in this context has not been tested. More information...
Expiry Date: Monday, January 8, 2024
Institution: University of Birmingham
Supervisor(s): Professor Richard Butler (Birmingham), Dr Kirsty Edgar (Birmingham), Dr Luke Meade (Birmingham), Dr Chris Reedman (Jurassic Coast Trust), Dr Susannah Maidment (Natural History Museum, London)
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: The Jurassic–Cretaceous (J/K) transition is an interval of important faunal turnover in Mesozoic terrestrial ecosystems, occasionally hypothesized to represent a poorly understood mass extinction event. Substantial faunal changes occur most notably within dinosaurs, where the sauropod and stegosaur-dominated herbivorous communities of the Late Jurassic are replaced in the Early Cretaceous by ornithopod-dominated communities. Other tetrapod groups such as lepidosaurs (lizards and snakes), amphibians and mammals show evidence for significant diversification around the J/K boundary. More information...
Expiry Date: Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Institution: University of Birmingham
Supervisor(s): Dr Kirsty Edgar and Dr Shan Huang, University of Birmingham, UK; Prof. Carrie Lear, Cardiff University, UK and Dr Sonal Khanolkar, GEOMAR, Germany.
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: Anthropogenic climate change is impacting biodiversity with direct consequences for ecosystem functioning and Earth system dynamics. However, our ability to predict changes is largely limited by the lack of clarity in the complex relationship between environmental and community change. This is particularly true of planktic foraminifera, a major group of calcifying marine plankton and key players in global carbon cycling. More information...
Expiry Date: Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Institution: University of Birmingham
Supervisor(s): Tom Dunkley Jones and Dr Kirsty Edgar, University of Birmingham, UK; Glen Wheeler, Marine Biological Association, UK, and Melanie Leng, British Geological Survey, UK.
Funding Status: Funding is in competition with other projects and students
Description: Phytoplankton – single cellular organisms that photosynthesise in the surface ocean – are the base of the open ocean marine food chain. In the mid-to-high latitude oceans phytoplankton growth is often dominated by rapid cell growth over a large area through spring and early summer, so called phytoplankton ‘blooms’. Although these blooms consist of single celled organisms, they reach such abundances as to be observable from space (Figure 1). More information...
Expiry Date: Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Institution: Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Supervisor(s): Prof. Duncan Mcilroy Memorial University of Newfoundland
Funding Status: Funding is in place for this project
Description: The new Inner Meadow Ediacaran locality in Conception Bay, only an hour drive from St. John’s, contains a dense diverse assemblage of the rangeomorphs Primocandelabrum, Charnia gracilis, Charnia sp. and related taxa; several of which are new/undescribed taxa. The site was discovered in 2022 at the edge of a small coastal community and partly exposed in 2023. We will conduct the remaining excavations in 2024 to expose the surface from beneath a layer of soil- who know what we will find! More information...
Expiry Date: Friday, March 1, 2024
