Ancient Life and Environments

As our planet is currently experiencing rapid change, understanding past environments and how life has continued to adapt to change provides key insights supporting our future resilience. In Geoscience at BEES, we undertake research encompassing characterisation, development and properties of past environments as well as palaeobiology and ecosystem responses to climate change.

Professor Maria McNamara - a palaeobiologist researching fossil preservation, the evolution of feathers and pigment melanin, bias in the fossil record, surface characterisation, microbeam analysis, vibrational spectroscopy, synchrontron X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and taphonomic experiments.

Professor Andy Wheeler - a marine geologist with an interest in benthic boundary layer processes and sediment transport, the geology of cold-water coral reefs, submarine canyon processes, and Irish offshore Quaternary stratigraphy, processes and palaeoenvironments

Dr Ed Jarvis – a palynologist and sedimentologist with interests in palynology, palaeoenvironments and peat stability

Dr Chris Mays - a palaeontologist researching how plants and land ecosystems responded to extreme events in Earth's past, and how these may inform the present and future.

Dr Riccardo Arosio – marine geoscientist studying marine geomorphology and evolution of Quaternary and Holocene landscapes

Dr Valentina Rossi - a palaeobiologist researching the preservation of pigments and soft tissues like skin and internal organs in fossil vertebrates

Dr Tiffany Slater - a palaeobiologist interested in the preservation potential of soft tissues

Dr Zixiao Yang- a palaeontologist researching fossilization and evolution of dinosaur and pterosaur integuments

Professor Ken Higgs (Emeritus) – a palynologist with a particular interest in biostratigraphy, evolution and palaeoenvironmental studies

Dr Richard Smosna (Adjunct) - -a sedimentologist with a primary interest in Paleozoic sedimentology, stratigraphy, and paleogeography, focusing especially on carbonate rocks of the Appalachian basin, and a secondary interest in the application of sedimentology to environmental problems of today's world.

Professor Peter Bruck (Emeritus) – a micropalaeontologist with an interest in Palaeozoic biostratigraphy

School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences

An Scoil Eolaíochtaí Bitheolaíocha, Domhaneolaíocha agus Comhshaoil

Distillery Fields, North Mall, University College Cork, Ireland , T23 N73K.

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