Palaeogeography and Palaeobiogeography: Biodiversity in Space and Time

Author Biography

Dr. Paul Upchurch is Reader in Palaeobiology at the Department of Earth Sciences, UCL. Having obtained a Ph.D. in vertebrate palaeontology from Cambridge in 1994, he used a series of fellowships from Sidney Sussex College (Cambridge), The Leverhulme Trust, and the NERC to develop his interest in historical biogeography. In particular, he has focused on the role that fossils can play in providing information on the timing and nature of biogeographic events such as vicariance and dispersal. Dr. Upchurch joined UCL in 2003 and has subsequently carried out research on dinosaur evolution, particularly with regard to their phylogenetic relationships and diversity patterns. At present he is working on a different, but related, aspect of deep time spatial distributions: latitudinal biodiversity gradients amongst terrestrial animals during the Cretaceous Period. Dr. Alistair J. McGowan, FGS is currently based in the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, funded by a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Scottish Government Postdoctoral Fellowship co-funded by Marie Curie Actions. He commenced his academic career as a geologist upon graduating from the University of Glasgow in Geology and Applied Geology in 1994. After three years of assorted jobs, including rebuilding a wooden boat in the most remote peninsula on mainland Scotland, mountain footpath construction, and streetsweeping, he returned to academia in 1997 to study for a M.Sc. in Palaeobiology at the University of Bristol, where his interests in quantitative palaeobiology were able to develop. This led to five years in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2003. Hence, although he is 39, he is only 34 in UK postdoc years. After a short spell at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, he returned to the UK to work with Paul Upchurch at UCL on a biogeographic simulation project as a research associate. This formative period cemented his interest exploring biodiversity in all four dimensions. He is also a Fellow of the British Trust for Ornithology and his voluntary work on bird surveys has been important in developing his ideas about sampling problems and biases in the fossil record, as well as straddling the divide between ecological and historical biogeography. Dr. Claire S. C. Slater completed her undergraduate studies in natural sciences, specializing into geological sciences, in 2002 at the University of Cambridge. She completed a M.Sc. at the Natural History Museum and Imperial College in London. She then returned to Trinity College, University of Cambridge, to commence her Ph.D. in 2003. It was during her Ph.D. that she had the great pleasure of being involved with co-organising (with Alistair J. McGowan and Paul Upchurch) the conference from which this book stemmed. She is currently pursuing a career in law but retains an enduring interest in palaeontology, biogeography, and the sciences.