CBER External Seminar - Dr Lewis Jones, UCL

Abstract: The fossil record provides the only direct empirical evidence of how biodiversity has varied over geological timescales, offering a unique perspective on long-term diversification and its underlying drivers. However, this archive is inherently incomplete and impacted by a suite of preservational and sampling biases that can obscure ‘true’ patterns and processes. In this seminar, I will explore these challenges through a series of case studies that highlight the difficulties of reconstructing palaeobiogeographic patterns. Specifically, I will demonstrate how incomplete and uneven spatial sampling can distort our understanding of the distribution of life in deep time, and its potential drivers. Subsequently, I will present how by integrating interdisciplinary approaches—including ecological and Earth system modelling, along with fossil occurrence datasets—we can achieve a more nuanced view of biodiversity and its drivers through deep time. While the seminar will focus on the fossil record of marine invertebrates and the reconstruction of latitudinal trends in biodiversity, the principles discussed are equally relevant to terrestrial organisms. I will conclude by introducing the research I plan to carry out here at University College London, focused on reconstructing the evolutionary history of Cenozoic marine biodiversity hotspots and testing their long-term drivers.