Anthony D. Barnosky

Department of Integrative Biology
University of California, Berkeley, CA
http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/barnosky/adbprofile.htm

Dr. Anthony Barnosky is a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley, curator at the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleontologist at Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. He is currently a Fellow in the California Academy of Sciences.

Barnosky's research revolves around understanding how changes in the physical environment (such as climate change and mountain building) contribute to the evolution of mammal species and faunas at varying temporal and geographic scales. Field aspects of the work include collecting fossils from long stratigraphic sequences that can be well-dated by biostratigraphic, paleomagnetic, or radioisotopic techniques. Lab analyses utilize database and GIS systems to identify faunal changes through space and time; the faunal patterns are then compared with independently identified changes in the physical environment to test various evolutionary and biogeographic predictions.

Dr. Barnosky works with high-elevation fossil mammals from the Colorado Rockies to explain biodiversity changes that accompanied glacial-interglacial transitions ~400 to ~800 thousand years ago, which provides information about potential effects of global warming. His group is also comparing the evolutionary patterns of Miocene mammals to tectonic events in the Montana-Wyoming Rockies, in order to determine how mountain building from 10-17 million years ago affected evolution and distribution of species, and the biodiversity patterns in the Greater Yellowstone region with an analogous region of northern Patagonia.