Content will focus on the long-term patterns of speciation, diversity, morphology change and extinction. These will be discussed in the context of environmental, climate and biotic controls. Content will span terrestrial and marine realms, and plant, invertebrate and microfossil groups.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Be able to assess and appraise the major controls on long-term records of speciation, extinction and trends in morphological evolution and adaptation across multiple marine & terrestrial, invertebrate and micro- fossil groups.
Be able to judge and evaluate between potential abiotic (climate, environment, palaeogeography) and biotic (competition, predation, co-evolution) drivers of large-scale patterns of evolution.
Critically assess, compare and evaluate large scale palaeontological datasets in the context of macroevolutionary studies.
Be able to use palaeontological data and palaeobiological theory to appraise and revise understandings of modern global change biology.