Jason Head

Vertebrate palaeontology and herpetology with emphasis on tropical faunal change in relation to climate through time.

 

Research Area

My research focuses on the evolution and ecology of vertebrates over the last 66 million years and how past relationships to global and regional-scale climatic transitions can be developed into forecasting tools for future conservation decisions. To do this, I combine palaeontological fieldwork in equatorial Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America with museum collections and the biology of living species to reconstruct how modern reptile lineages and faunas have evolved and responded to histories of warming and cooling at the hottest latitudes during the hottest intervals.

My datasets range from anatomies of fossils to physiologies of living species to geochemical proxies for palaeoclimate, and I use methods such as geometric morphometrics to quantify anatomical form, phylogenetic analysis to infer evolutionary relationships, and evolutionary modelling such as ancestral state reconstruction and comparative phylogenetic techniques to reconstruct the histories of functional traits, such as body size, locomotory mode, and feeding morphology, through deep and shallow time. My research is collaborative, and I work with colleagues in North America, Europe, Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, and Southeast Asia.

 

Project Interests

I am interested in a wide range of research topics that examine the vertebrate fossil record but would particularly like to develop projects on the Cenozoic reptiles, such as building palaeoenvironmental proxies from functional traits, reconstructing histories of diversity change in relation to tectonically-mediated climate change in Eastern Africa, and inferring phylogenetic relationships within hyper-diverse clades such as snakes.