Anjali Goswami, Research Leader in Life Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London tackles a simple, but deeply profound question in her research - why has life on Earth evolved the way that it has?
“With data from thousands of extinct and living animals, we are now beginning to understand what forces direct the trajectory and tempo of evolution,” Goswami said.
Goswami will be exploring this subject in Peabody’s annual John H. Ostrom Lecture, entitled “The Speed of Life: A Deep-Time Perspective,” taking place Saturday, February 1 at 4 pm at the OC Marsh Lecture Hall, 260 Whitney Ave., New Haven. Admission is free, and registration is recommended.
Why is evolution seemingly a story of fits and starts, with long periods of relative stability interrupted by rapid transitions? What allows some species to survive and quickly exploit new opportunities, while others go extinct? Why do the same forms evolve over and over again in different groups, at different times, and in different places, while many hypothetical forms never evolve at all? “The fossil record demonstrates that with great change comes great unpredictability,” Goswami said.
Evolutionary paths in many ways are as diverse as life itself, but commonalities abound in how species respond to changes in their world, with characteristics such as social behavior, metamorphosis, and diet seeming to speed up the pace of evolution, she said.
In addition to her role at the Natural History Museum, London, Goswami is Honorary Professor in Palaeobiology in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment at University College London. She currently serves as President of the Linnean Society of London.
Her main research interests are in vertebrate evolution and development, especially using 3D morphometric methods to incorporate data from embryos to fossils to test genetic and developmental hypotheses of modularity and morphological diversity and reconstruct macroevolutionary patterns through deep time.
She is also currently working on the relationships and paleobiogeography of Mesozoic and early Cenozoic mammals, particularly focusing on Gondwanan eutherians, with a project uniting genomics and fossils to elucidate early placental evolution.
Goswami conducts fieldwork in the Cretaceous and Palaeogene of India and Argentina, but has previously been involved in fieldwork in Svalbard, Peru, Chile, Madagascar, and the United States.
The lecture is named for John H. Ostrom (1928-2005), the Yale paleontologist who revolutionized the modern understanding of dinosaurs through his research. Ostrom’s work included the discovery of the fossil of the creature he named Deinonychus (‘terrible claw”).
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