Jonathan Payne
Stanford University, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Why do new kinds of animals appear when and where they do? Paleontology has spent decades asking the opposite question, which species go extinct and why, and has shown that traits like body size influence survival.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Biology
- Topics
body size
origination
biodiversity
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- 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database of marine animal body size measurements spanning the last 575 million years, incorporating previously unpublished Ediacaran body-size data from the interval preceding the main animal fossil record.
- Test whether the origination of new marine animal taxa is biased toward particular body sizes, and whether that bias differs among major taxonomic groups and shifts across geologic time.
- Evaluate whether body-size selectivity of origination changes consistently under distinct environmental regimes, using statistical models that relate size trends to proxies for marine anoxia, temperature and other environmental variables.
- Assess how incomplete and uneven fossil sampling affects the observed selectivity patterns, distinguishing genuine biological signal from artifacts of the fossil record.
More about the research
Far less is known about origination, the appearance of new taxa, even though it is half of what sets biodiversity. This project asks whether the origination of marine animals over the past 575 million years follows predictable patterns tied to body size and to the environment, using the fossil record as the only available long-term experiment.
Why it matters
Oceans today are warming and losing oxygen, the same kinds of change this project links to body size patterns in the fossil record. Quantifying which sizes of marine animals tend to originate under which environmental conditions could improve forecasts of how species emergence and ecosystem resilience respond to current change, with bearing on fisheries and food security, coastal economies and biodiversity management. The standardized body size database will be released openly for other researchers.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Sarah Sheffield
Binghamton University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
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.
Matthew Clapham
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Earth & Environmental Science
Overhaul the Paleobiology Database's data model, database and application logic to integrate features from the Integrative Paleobotany Portal (PBot), streamline data entry and improve long-term sustainability.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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