生命科学学院2015年度春季学期学术系列讲座之八

题目：Written in Stone: Early Animal Evolution on the Eve of the Cambrian Explosion

讲座人：Shuhai Xiao

Prof. of Geobiology

Virginia Tech

时间：2015年5月22日，13:00-14:30pm

地点：邓祐才报告厅

联系人：姚锦仙

Abstract:

Animals came to the fossil record, in large numbers and diverse forms, in a remarkable episode of evolutionary history known as the Cambrian explosion. During the Cambrian explosion, which occurred about 541-520 million years ago, animals as we know them diversified, they evolved an impressive set of skeletons, and they were engaged in various ecological interactions with each other (for example predator-prey relationships). The ancestry of these Cambrian animals is one of the greatest enigmas that have baffled many biologists, geologists, and paleontologists since Charles Darwin who attributed the lack of Precambrian animal fossils, as was perceived in the 19th century, to their poor preservation because they were small, soft-bodied, or both. In the past few decades, paleontologists and geologists have made many new discoveries that shed light on the dark eve of the Cambrian explosion. Dr. Shuhai Xiao from Virginia Tech will discuss some of these new discoveries. He will focus on the Ediacaran Period, which immediately predates the Cambrian Period and ranges from 635 to 541 million years ago (thus central to a better understanding of the eve of the Cambrian explosion). He will present a series of Ediacaran fossils that may offer new insights to the prehistory of Cambrian animals, taking the audience from steaming Yangtze Gorges to freezing Arctic Siberia, from scorching desert in Namibia to jagged terrains in Himalayas, and from sunny South Australia to stormy Newfoundland. The new discoveries suggest the Ediacaran Period seems to represent a 90-million-year fuse to the Cambrian explosion, although it remains uncertain what might have lit the fuse and what might have been the “explosives” for the Cambrian explosion.

Bio:

Dr. Xiao is a geobiologist. He integrates paleobiological, sedimentological, and geochemical data to understand the interactions between life and environments at critical transitions during early Earth history. He is particularly interested in the environmental context and geobiological impact of early animal evolution in the Neoproterozoic (1000-540 million years ago). He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in Geology from Peking University and his PhD in Biology from Harvard University in 1998. He was an assistant professor at Tulane University (2000-2003), and an assistant professor (2003-2005) and associate professor (2005-2008) at Virginia Tech, and is currently professor of geobiology at Virginia Tech. He has published more than 150 papers. He was the recipient of the 2006 Charles Schuchert Award awarded by the Paleontological Society, 2010 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 2010 Virginia Tech Alumni Award for Excellence in Research, 2014 Sir Albert Charles Seward Memorial Lecturer at Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany in India, and 2014 GSA Geobiology & Geomicrobiology Award. Recently he has been selected to be a 2016-2017 Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar.

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