Almost all major animal groups appeared on Earth half a billion years ago in an event known as the Cambrian explosion. Certain fossil sites from this time have been used to reconstruct what communities of marine animals were like and to study the evolution of ecosystem complexity. However, the fossils are rarely considered in the context of how the sedimentary rocks in which they are preserved were deposited. Here, I will take you on a tour from studying trackways in a museum, to fieldwork on the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and into the laboratory where new experiments are helping to unravel this problem.
Animals and their environments have been interacting and modifying one another since life began. Dr Minter is interested in co-evolution between life and the planet. He works at the interface among palaeontology, sedimentology and behavioural ecology; focussing on organism-substrate interactions and what they can tell us about the make-up of ecosystems through time and their responses to major events in the history of the Earth. These include evolutionary radiations, colonization events and mass extinctions.