Dr Nicolás Campione
Senior Lecturer in Palaeobiology - Faculty of Science, Agriculture, Business and Law; School of Environmental and Rural Science
Biography
Dr Campione's research combines traditional palaeontological practices, such as field-based and taxonomic research, with quantitative techniques to explore biology in the fossil record. The fossil record can tell us much about anatomical variation in the past and the changes that such variation has undergone over time; a direct record of evolution. However, it is much more difficult to interpret why variation changes or the factors that drove it. To this end, Dr Campione adopts a suite of morphometric and phylogenetic techniques to define ranges of morphological variation in the fossil record and correlate these with ecologically relevant data from the living record. To date, his research has contributed new knowledge on the nature and evolution of dinosaur body size, the origin of feathers in dinosaurs, and the extinction/recovery patterns of sharks across the end-Cretaceous extinction.
Although dinosaurs continue to drive much of Dr Campione’s research, his research group studies anatomical variation in an array of organisms, including sharks, mammals, and invertebrates. His field programmes include the Boreal Alberta Dinosaur Project (in Alberta Canada), along with exploring the mid-Cretaceous and Early Triassic vertebrate diversity in Australia. The latter includes projects in southern Queensland, northern NSW, and Tasmania.
