PhD: Invasion of the Stragglers: Sedimentary and Ichnological Insights into the Carboniferous Climax of the Terrestrialization of Life

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 interval in which nonmarine life became 'modern' and triggered cascade effects in shaping Earth Surface processes and landforms.

The climax of the terrestrialization of life has been overlooked in comparison to its inception. The filling of nonmarine niches was a milestone in the evolution of the Earth system. For the first time, this interval will be the focus of a comprehensive study that will enable a new understanding of how new landscapes were created and populated, and provide insights into the development of feedback loops between life, landscape and surface processes in non-marine environments.

The student will undertake extensive fieldwork to collect new sedimentological, ichnological and palaeontological data from Carboniferous continental strata: most notably from across the United Kingdom and within the Maritimes Basin of eastern Canada. By focussing on the understudied Carboniferous interval through database construction, classical facies analysis, mapping and stratigraphic fieldwork, the project will resolve our understanding of sedimentary landscapes during a transitional period which was crucial to the evolution of life on Earth.