Paleontology, Writing, and Teaching
The diversity around us today is a fraction of a percent of all the species that have ever lived
I study the fossil record to understand major events in the history of life, and the origins and evolution of biodiversity in the broadest sense.
The diversity we see around us now is some small fraction of 1% of all the species that have ever lived. To understand the origins of this diversity we need fossils.
Fossils tell us things about evolution we would otherwise couldn’t know. When, and where, organisms originated. The tempo of evolution. What intermediate forms looked like. The existence of extinction, of mass extinction, recovery- where we came from as a species, and why we are here.
Contact Information
Dr. Nicholas R. Longrich
Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology
Department of Biology and Biochemistry
University of Bath
Claverton Down
Bath BA2 7AY, United Kingdom
nicholas.longrich@bath.ac.uk
About
Dr. Nick Longrich is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist born and raised in the town of Kodiak, Alaska, on the island of the same name. The place with the bears. Raised by his father, a commercial fisherman who skippered the fishing boat Kodiak back at the height of the Bering Sea king crab fishery in the 1970s and 80s, and his mother, a middle school art teacher, he studies fossils to understand how and why the way the world came to be.
Research Interests
Dr. Nick Longrich’s research uses fossils to understand major events in the evolution of life on earth, including the origins of complex adaptations, mass extinction, adaptive radiation, and the origins of the human species.
Nick focuses on a range of study organisms, including dinosaurs, birds, mosasaurs, lizards, and snakes, and a variety of problems, including the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction, Paleogene adaptive radiation, the origins of birds, the origins of snakes, biogeographic patterns and processes, and large-scale trends in the evolution of life. Lately his research has expanded to include the origins, evolution and extinction of Homo sapiens and other human species.
Dr. Longrich’s work has been published in numerous peer-reviewed articles, including Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Biology, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, and eLife. View his high-impact publications here and his full CV here.
Dr. Longrich is the author of a series of popular articles for The Conversation on evolution, including articles on the existence of extraterrestrial life, the role of mass extinction in evolution, and the origins- and eventual extinction- of Homo sapiens. You can read the articles here.
“…discovery means breaking away from the conventional. If you look at the world the same way everyone else does, you just see the same things.”
Get in Touch
I’m always happy to talk to students in search of advice, or others interested in evolution.
