PhD: The Stragglers Invade the Land: Sedimentary and Ichnological Insights into the Carboniferous Terrestrialization Climax

The colonization of the land by animal and plant communities was a crucial event in the evolution of life on Earth. A large amount of existing research into this area has previously been focussed on pushing back the earliest evidence of life on land or on understanding the crucial juncture of the Silurian (444-419 Ma) , when continental trace fossils rapidly increased in abundance and disparity across the globe. However, the climax of the terrestrialization process has been relatively overlooked. It was only much later, in the Carboniferous (359-299 Ma), that certain key continental habitats began to be colonized (e.g., deep lakes), or even evolve (e.g., plant-stabilized river islands or mires). This project aims to provide a new global perspective on the ichnology of this understudied but crucial interval of Earth history: arguably more significant than the first tentative footsteps on land, this was the period in which nonmarine life, and the continental landscapes that it inhabited, became modern, permanent and irreversible.