Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

Pincelli Hull (Yale) - Too long for ecology & too short for geology: the promise of fossils for understanding the biotic dimensions of modern global change
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The deep-time fossil record captures the historical response of open ocean ecosystems and species to profound, global disturbance on scale with the vast temporal and spatial scales of modern climate change. As primary records of past events, fossils have the potential to provide novel insight into the dynamical response of oceans to large-scale environmental change, and to elucidate the feedbacks between species, communities, biogeochemical cycles, and climate. My research focuses on understanding the ecological and evolutionary responses of pelagic species to change across a range of scales –from El Niños to mass extinctions – through a combination of data-dense records, numerical simulations, and theoretical models. My talk will highlight the promise (and challenges) of using paleontological records for understanding modern oceans, with examples from the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction and other disturbances in the Cenozoic.