Dr Emily Mitchell, a mid-career researcher at the University of Cambridge and member of LCLU, has been awarded the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant — one of the most competitive research awards in Europe. This year, eight Cambridge researchers share part of the ERC’s record €728 million funding pot, supporting frontier projects across fields from Astronomy to Zoology.
Dr Mitchell's Deep-time Ecology Group's REVEAL project will focus on the organisms that emerged during the Ediacaran period, 600 million years ago. While we know the Ediacaran organisms were animals, their unique anatomies have hampered our understanding of what shaped their evolution. Capitalising on the in-situ, census preservation of Ediacaran animals, this project will bring together geochemistry, palaeontology and evolutionary biology, to for the first time, quantify fitness and phenotypic evolution in early animals to determine the relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors to selection and so determine how and why the adaptive landscape changed for early animals.
Article includes materials from the piece written by Abigail Youngman (Zoology Department news.)