A 350-million-year-old marine ecosystem in Scotland
Vertebrates before and after the end-Devonian extinction (from Sallan and Galimberti, Science, 2015)
348 million year old fish Aetheretmon, showing the ancestral double tail alongside a modern pufferfish with (lower) caudal fin alone.
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| Lauren Sallan, PhD
Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies
Dept. of Earth and Environmental Science (primary) Dept. of Biology (secondary))
University of Pennsylvania
2019 TED Senior Fellow
lsallan@upenn.edu
Leidy Labs 215C
CV Google Citations Wikipedia
Watch my TED Talk on Winning through Mass Extinction!
Watch our TED-Ed Lesson on Why Fishes Are Fish-Shaped!
Research Summary
We use 'Big Data' approaches, evolutionary trees and detailed study of fossil fishes to determine how global events, environmental change and ecological interactions shaped long-term change (macroevolution) and established modern biodiversity.
Our analyses use deep-time databases for early vertebrates (half of vertebrate history), fishes (half of vertebrate diversity), marine ecosystems and mass extinctions.
Research Interests
Paleobiology/Paleontology
Macroevolution, Macroecology,
Early Vertebrates, Ichthyology
Mass Extinction, Phylogenetics
Biomechanics, Evo-Devo
Listen to a FutureProof interview about our research in mass extinction.
Listen to a Palaeocast interview about our research on early vertebrate macroevolution and paleobiology.
NewsSeptember, 2019: Lauren received a secondary appointment in the Department of Biology at Penn and joined the Biology Graduate Group. We moved to the Leidy Laboratories building .
July, 2019: Lauren attended TEDSummit in Edinburgh, Scotland and gave a TED Talk!
June, 2019: Lauren, John, Jack and Ananth attended and presented at the North American Paleontological Convention in Riverside, CA.
April, 2019: We received an NSF CAREER Award to support our efforts to build an ecological database of all fossil fishes and host undergrad researchers for the next 5 years! Jack received both the Henry Darwin Rogers Award for Excellence in the Study of Earth Science and The 2019 Rose Undergraduate Research Award for his senior thesis! Lauren attended TED2019 in Vancouver.
January, 2019: Lauren was selected as a 2019 TED Senior Fellow! She will have the opportunity to attend 4 more TED events, give at least one more TED Talk, and receive mentoring, and support in science communication!
October, 2018 Our new paper on vertebrate habitat origins was published in Science. We found that all early fishes, jawed and jawless, diversified in shallow coastal waters and only later shifted to reefs. This "Invasion of the Ocean" was dependent on pre-existing traits just like the Invasion of land. We received a Perspective by Catalina Pimiento and press coverage in the New York Times, New Scientist, BBC, CBC, Gizmodo, The Conversation, Cosmos Magazine, and many other outlets!
October, 2018 Lauren, John, Jack, and Ananth all traveled to the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in Albuquerque, NM. Lauren presented in the "Big Questions, Big Data" symposium. John presented on a new ray-finned fish from Red Hill, Pennsylvania. Jack presented on a long-rostrumed Carboniferous fish and the structure of elongated snouts in ray-finned fishes.
September, 2018 Jack Stack has published his first paper! His survey of the Devonian fishes of Michigan, which involved over a hundred new specimens collected by Jack himself, is open access in PeerJ. Congratulations, Jack!
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A 310-million-year-old freshwater ecosystem in Illinois
(From Sallan, Biological Reviews, 2014)
A later shell-crushing ray-fin, Styracopterus, 340 million years ago
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