Annabel Nicholls
- Email: bqrm0858@leeds.ac.uk
- Thesis title: ‘A predator-prey arms race in Mesozoic oceans’
- Supervisors: Dr Alex Dunhill, Professor Paul Wignall, Professor Andrew Beckerman, Dr Elizabeth Petsios, Dr Jack Shaw
Profile
I am a PhD student within the School of Earth and Environment, funded by the NERC Panorama DTP.
I will be working on a palaeoecology based project ‘A predator-prey arms race in Mesozoic oceans’, exploring the community structures of marine fauna during the Mesozoic Era. It will explore the connection to the Mesozoic Marine Revolution (MMR) in which newly evolved and diversified predators (i.e. durophagous fish, malacostracan crustaceans, drilling gastropods etc) stimulated the evolutionary response of benthic marine organisms to develop flight (i.e. increased motility and/or infaunality) and defence (i.e. spikier and thicker shells) mechanisms to avoid being predated. To do this I will be reconstructing food webs of these marine communities from the fossil record.
Research interests
- Macroevolution
- Palaeobiology and Palaeoecology
- Vertebrate evolution
- Zoology
Qualifications
- MBiol Zoology, Aberystwyth University