Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
When Earth's climate changes sharply, animals can respond by evolving new body forms, moving to new regions or taking up new ways of life. Fossils record how this happened in the deep past, and that record can help predict how evolution may unfold during today's biodiversity and climate crises.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
paleontology
paleobiology
echinoderms
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Test how ancient climate events affected heterochrony, meaning shifts in developmental timing, in Paleozoic echinoderms, using phylogenetic trees built from museum, database and literature data.
- Measure changes in rates of evolution among extinct echinoderm groups across extreme climate perturbations within a phylogenetic framework.
- Track how the geographic ranges (biogeography) and ecology of Paleozoic echinoderms shifted through ancient climate events, and how these shifts relate to heterochrony.
- Train undergraduates in museum research techniques through summer workshops, and publish open-access echinoderm resources in the Digital Atlas of Ancient Life and a WikiProject hub.
More about the research
This project looks at Paleozoic echinoderms, ancient relatives of sea stars that lived in oceans worldwide hundreds of millions of years ago. The group remains little studied.
Why it matters
Learning how ancient marine animals changed their development, range and ecology during past climate upheavals could help scientists predict how living species will respond to today's climate change and biodiversity loss. The project's open-access textbook content and its central online hub for echinoderm resources will also give students, educators and researchers freely available information.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Peter Siver
Connecticut College, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Document new species, physical traits and past environmental conditions for each silica-bearing freshwater protist group in an 82-million-year North American fossil collection, using scanning electron microscopy data.
Philip Novack-Gottshall
Benedictine University, IL·Ecology & Evolution
Test four hypotheses about how ecological diversity differs among marine animal phyla and classes and through Phanerozoic time, using a quantitative life-habit database covering all known marine animal genera.
Jonathan Payne
Stanford University, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Extend a standardized database of marine animal body size measurements spanning the last 575 million years, incorporating previously unpublished Ediacaran body-size data from the interval preceding the main animal fossil record.
The school
Binghamton University: 14 labs on PI Pages, $161M a year on research, 132 research doctorates a year.
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