Lindsey Leighton

Email

lleighto@ualberta.ca

Phone

(780) 492-3983

Address

1-01B Earth Sciences Building

11223 Saskatchewan Drive NW

Edmonton AB

T6G 2E3

Research Interests

• Evolution and ecology of predator-prey systems, and their effects on biodiversity, through time
• Identifying those organismal features that facilitate survivorship through mass-extinction events
• Functional morphology and biomechanics of marine invertebrates, with special attention to animal-substrate and animal-flow interactions
• Integrating modern and fossil data to address ecological questions

Although the planet faces a shocking biodiversity crisis, we are struggling to understand which factors control biodiversity. Given the urgency of the crisis, understanding the processes that influence biodiversity should be a primary task not only for conservation but for paleobiology as well.  However, we currently lack an explicit connection between the global, deep-time scales of paleobiology and the fine spatial and temporal scales of ecology. Filling this gap should be a pressing concern, we need more explorations of fine-scale processes through deep time and more comparisons with modern ecology. Much of my research is designed to fill that gap.

read more at Leighton Lab website