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Erin in the collections at the UCMNH |
I am interested in biological interactions through time, especially between plants and animals. I explore the ways in which plants and animals have used and abused each other over geological timescales, and how they have struggled for the right balance between offense and defense.
I am especially interested in looking at specialized interactions between plants and animals in modern ecosystems and seeing how far back they can be tracked in the fossil record. What are the physical and biological factors that allow these interactions to be established and to persist? How flexible are the systems? I am trying to address these questions with a series of remarkable fossil deposits that span the last 50 million years of western North American terrestrial ecosystems.
