The origin and rise of complex life: integrating models, geochemical and palaeontological data

Ben is an Academic Fellow at the University of Leeds. He is a mathematician and biogeochemical modeller whose research focuses on the dynamics of the Earth system over geological timescales. He designs and builds computer models to make quantitative predictions for changes in climate and surface geochemistry that relate to both the evolution of the biosphere, and to the planet’s internal geodynamic processes. His key contributions are reconstructions of long-term Phanerozoic climate change, evaluation of the processes by which the atmosphere and oceans have become oxygenated, and determining the causes and consequences of severe ‘Snowball Earth’ glaciations.

Kurt Konhauser is a Professor in Geochemistry and Geomicrobiology at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on mineral-metal-microbe interactions through time, including surface reactivity, biomineralization and biochemical weathering. His current interests are understanding how Earth and photosynthetic life co-evolved in the distant past, specifically the role of bacteria in the precipitation of banded iron formations and the causes for the rise of oxygen on the early Earth. He is a Fellow of the Geochemical Society and the Royal Society of Canada, and was previously a Canada Research Chair in Geomicrobiology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Geobiology, co-editor of the book Fundamentals of Geobiology, and sole author of the textbook Introduction to Geomicrobiology.

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A focus of Dr Love's research program is molecular organic geochemistry, particularly the analysis of stable organic compounds preserved in ancient sedimentary rocks, oils and meteorites.  Additionally, he use a range of complementary stable isotope and inorganic geochemical approaches for understanding carbon and other element biogeochemical cycling in the modern and ancient biosphere. Dr Love continued to use and refine novel analytical approaches that I helped develop with applications in geobiology, astrobiology and organic geochemistry. His degrees were in Chemistry but he developed a curiosity about the environmental and evolutionary history of our planet during his PhD research. After his PhD degree, Dr Love was awarded a NERC Fellowship to conduct lipid biomarker research at University of Newcastle then he spent three years at MIT as a Research Fellow. He joined the faculty at University of California-Riverside in 2007 and is currently Professor of Biogeochemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences.

Dr Tostevin is a new lecturer in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Cape Town. Previously, she has worked as a postdoc at the University of Oxford and the University of Otago. She completed her PhD at University College London in 2015. She is interested in interactions between life and the environment on the early Earth. Dr Tostevin has worked on tracking major shifts in oceanic redox that occurred in the Precambrian using a variety of geochemical proxies, working closely with paleo-ecologists to tie together the chemical and ecological records.

How sensitive is our climate system to the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane? What are the biogeochemical consequences of adding carbonic acid (CO2 dissolved in rainwater) to the ocean? How sensitive are organisms and ecosystems to all these changes? Because of the complexity of the Earth’s climate system, and often, simply because of our lack of imagination about all the different ways in which the Earth can respond to being poked, a comprehensive answer to these questions is extremely difficult to achieve, even with our best climate and carbon cycle models. Understanding the past can help, as Earth history is characterised by an extraordinary richness of climatic and carbon cycling behaviour. Andy Ridgewell's work surrounds creating computer model representations of the key Earth system components and applying them in interrogating the past so as to help better constrain the future.

Professor Sperling's research interests are Earth history and the evolution of life, and the interactions between the biosphere and the geosphere. As such this research can generally be considered paleontology, insofar as paleontology encompasses all aspects of the history of life. His research incorporates multiple lines of evidence, and multiple tools, to investigate questions in the history of life. These lines of evidence include fossil data, molecular phylogenetics, sedimentary geochemistry, and ecological and physiological data from modern organisms. Ultimately, the goal is to link environmental change with organismal and ecological response through the lens of physiology.

Noah Planavsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University. He studies the connections between the evolution of Earth-system processes, biological innovation, and ecosystem change—foremost in Earth’s early history. His research integrates field, petrographic, and geochemical work. A central theme of his research has been trying to piece together the history and effects of Earth’s oxygenation. He has also worked on reconstructing the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels through Earth’s history. Current projects include coupling paleoredox proxies, calibrating novel metal isotope systems in modern aqueous systems and disentangling the distribution and diagenetic history of traces metals in sedimentary rocks.

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Ross Anderson is a palaeobiologist at All Souls College, Oxford. He uses fossils to chart the evolution of early complex life through the Proterozoic Eon (2.5–0.5 billion years ago). Understanding how changing fossil diversity correlates to environmental changes—and the Proterozoic Eon sees some of the largest in Earth’s history—is vital to determining evolutionary drivers. Not only does he seek new fossils that provide this important palaeobiological information, he critically interrogates the nature of the fossil record. Before the terminal Proterozoic advent of biomineralisation, fossilisation is confined to poorly understood and unusual circumstances that preserve organic remains. Anderson uses novel analytical techniques on fossiliferous strata to understand the conditions conducive to preservation. Such research is crucial to our ability to robustly interpret the temporal and ecological range of early fossil organisms. It can also provide new insights into their original chemistry and biology.

Dr Lidya Tarhan is a paleontologist and sedimentologist in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University. Her research is centered on using the sedimentary record to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of the co-evolution of ancient life and environments during critical intervals in Earth’s history, while jointly exploring fossilization processes and the manner in which preservational biases modify the stratigraphic record. Her recent work has focused on the radiation of complex macroscopic and multicellular life, including the enigmatic Ediacara Biota, as well as the emergence of early animals as ecosystem engineers, including the timing and geobiological consequences attending the rise of bioturbation. She additionally investigates animal-sediment interactions in modern marine environments. Her research combines a field-based sedimentological and paleoecological approach with a geochemical and modeling toolkit.

Graham Budd (b. 1968) studied at the University of Cambridge, UK, where he completed a PhD under the supervision of Professor Simon Conway Morris FRS (Cambridge) and Professor John S Peel (Copenhagen) on the topic of exceptionally-preserved Cambrian arthropods from Greenland. Since 1994 he has worked in the Department of Earth Sciences of Uppsala University, Sweden where he is currently professor of evolutionary palaeobiology. Current research interests include the early evolution of animals with particular interest in arthropods, the evolution of complex systems and the evolution of development.

Maoyan Zhu studied geology and paleontology at the Changchun College of Geology (now Jilin University), and received his PhD in 1992 at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he became professor in 1998. He is voting members of the Ediacaran and Cambrian subcommissions (ICS), and chair of the international working group on the base of the Cambrian. He was awarded the Group Prize of Brilliant Contribution (Qiu Shi Sciences & Technologies Foundation, 1997), CAS Hundred Talents (1998), Distinguished Young Scholars (NSFC, 2007), Yin Zanxun Award (Palaeontological Society of China, 2009) and international corresponding member of Academy of Science Göttingen (2013).

His research interests focus on the origin and early evolution of multicellular organisms and animals, Neoproterozoic-Cambrian stratigraphy and palaeo-environmental changes through integrated approach. Currently, he act as a Chinese leader of the NERK-NSFC co-funded project entitled  Perturbation of the Earth System at the Proterozoic-Phanerozoic transition and the resilience of the biosphere (BETR).

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Susannah received her bachelor's degree in Mathematics from Yale University in 1995 and her Ph.D. in Biology at Harvard University in 2002. After completing a one-year NASA Astrobiology Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCLA, she moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she is Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Earth Science. She studies the early fossil record of animals and their protistan relatives and has worked on problems relating to the evolution of skeletal biomineralization, the influence of snowball Earth glaciations on the biosphere, the early evolution of eukaryotes, and the Cambrian diversification of animals. She lives in Carpinteria, California, with her husband, Jamie, and her two sons, Willie and Sam.