Mark Patzkowsky

Research in the Patzkowsky lab focuses on the ecological, evolutionary, and geological processes that control the diversity, distribution, and abundance of fossil taxa in time and space.  Lab members have worked in the Cambrian of Montana, the Ordovician from Pennsylvania to Nevada, the Devonian of central Pennsylvania, the Mississippian of the Illinois and Appalachian basins, the Pennsylvanian and Permian of the Midcontinent, the Paleogene of the Gulf Coast, and the Neogene of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. One of the main threads through all the field research is the collection and interpretation of fossils in a sequence stratigraphic framework emphasizing how the architecture of the stratigraphic record affects the preservation and distribution of fossils. 

The Patzkowsky lab also studies the geographic and environmental patterns of extinction and recovery across the Late Ordovician and end-Cretaceous mass extinctions.  These two mass extinctions had very different effects on the history of life and we are trying to quantify those different effects.  Recently, we have performed this work using a phylogenetic framework. This approach, called phylogenetic paleoecology, is required to understand the evolutionary underpinning of large-scale ecologic patterns of extinction and diversification.  We are also using models of speciation and extinction and models of anatomical change to better constrain the relationship between environmental change and the diversification of a major brachiopod clade during the Ordovician radiations.