PhD: Assessing fossils, fossilization and phylogeny to reconstruct the origin and evolution of arthropods

Can the fossil record be reliably used to reconstruct the relationships of extinct organisms? Do the losses of morphology that occur during decay and fossilization cause biases in our interpretations of fossils? How is our understanding of evolutionary processes changed when we take fossilization filters and biases into account? This project aims to address these questions by focusing on the origin and early evolution of arthropods - one of the most important evolutionary episodes in the history of life on earth. A combination of phylogenetic simulations, modeling and laboratory experiments investigating anatomical decomposition will be undertaken to assess fossilization biases and their effect on interpretations of arthropod fossils and phylogeny. The data generated from theoretical and empirical studies will serve as a powerful and unique tool with which to re-visit the palaeontological data and the evolutionary inferences drawn from them.