Digging up dirt on Earth’s “remarkable” history

Equipped with the 600 million-year-long record of complex life, a Victoria University of Wellington professor is unearthing patterns of evolution and biodiversity change through time.

Professor James Crampton has been working in the field of paleontology for more than 30 years—leading research that explores the fossil record in New Zealand and around the world to reveal a long history of biodiversity.

As he will explain in his upcoming inaugural lecture, Professor Crampton has analysed large databases of fossil occurrences, such as the New Zealand Fossil Record File and international compilations, using sophisticated quantitative approaches to look at patterns of changing biodiversity over time.

Using these tools, palaeontologists can explore the remarkable but damaged record of life—or as Professor Crampton likes to call it, “Earth’s diary.” He says it’s a story of evolution, extinction, competition, chance, catastrophes and a planetary pulse.

“From this diary we know that single-celled life forms have been around for most of the 4.6-billion-year history of planet Earth, but that complex life has ‘only’ been around for about 600 million years.

“One key task of paleontology has been to try to figure out exactly when and why complex life and ecosystems evolved, and to understand what controls the numbers of species that can occupy our small planet.”

In his lecture Professor Crampton will discuss this research using a range of different organisms as diverse as clams and snails, single-celled algae, strange extinct, floating oceanic animals—and even dinosaurs.

Professor Crampton joined Victoria University in 2012 and has since taken a lead role in the research and teaching of paleontology and sedimentology at Victoria. He has led two Marsden-funded projects and assisted on three others, and as a science programme leader at GNS Science was responsible for managing multimillion-dollar government research projects.

Most recently, in partnership with Ngai Tūhoe and GNS Science, Professor Crampton has been working to explore potentially fossil-bearing rock formations in Te Urewera.