Research Interests

I use various quantitative approaches to understand fossil communities throughout Earth’s history focusing on these topics:

• Stratigraphic and sedimentological processes that govern the preservation of fossil communities
• The interplay between sequence stratigraphic patterns and paleoecology
• Response of fossil communities to sea level change, reconstructing paleobathymetry using fossils
• Differential preservation (taphonomy) of fossils across system tracts
• Taphonomy of various time averaged facies across transgressive and regressive cycles
• Ecological turnover in response to sea level change
• The preservation potential of extreme environments such as rocky intertidal habitats, where environments are harsh and not ideal for preservation in the fossil record
• Preservational biases of juveniles versus adults in the rock record

Field Areas

• Northeastern Italy, the Po coastal plain
• San Salvador Island, the Bahamas
• St. Louis, Missouri (USA)
• The Cincinnati Arch: Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana (USA)
• Arisaig, Nova Scotia (Canada)