Time: 6:30 - 7:30pm Venue: Skeel Lecture Theatre, People's Palace, Mile End campus, London E1 4NS
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Attendance is free of charge, but you must book in advance.
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Fossil ostracod shells provide a rich record of their evolution as well as the environmental and climatic change witnessed by these tiny crustaceans which today inhabit oceans, seas, estuaries, lagoons, lakes, rivers, ponds and springs. This lecture will highlight four case studies from the ostracod archive: Palaeozoic oceans and climate; Mesozoic lakes, temporary ponds and dinosaurs; Mesozoic oceans in a greenhouse world; and the Pleistocene expansion of early humans into NW Europe. Each provides opportunities to explore the benefits of international, interdisciplinary scientific collaboration as well as the challenges of applying a uniformitarian, palaeobiological approach to the interpretation of fossil ostracod assemblages.
Dave Horne is Professor of Micropalaeontology in the School of Geography where he has worked since 2003 and was made a professor in 2012. To complement his geological and micropalaeontological training he chose to study living ostracod ecology and life cycles for his PhD (1980), since when his research has combined palaeontological and zoological approaches, spanning the Phanerozoic record of ostracod evolution. He has published over 150 journal articles and books, mostly co-authored with scientific collaborators in Europe, North America or Japan. The main focus of his efforts over the past decade has been the development and application of an ostracod-based method for the quantitative reconstruction of past climatic conditions, in pursuit of which he is working with contributors around the world to establish a taxonomically-harmonised global database of freshwater ostracod distribution.