DrJohn Finarelli

I started my career working on mammal evolution, primarily with the order Carnivora. And while I continue to pursue research in the Carnivora, I have expanded my interests to many other mammalian taxa, including rodents, artiodactyls, and primates. In addition, I am interested in the origin of gnathostomes (jawed vertebrates), specifically with respect to the early diversification of body plans in living and extinct groups. I currently work with several Palaeozoic groups, including chondrichthyans (sharks and their relatives), and two extinct grades of jawed fish: placoderms and acanthodians.

Subjects that I am interested in are varied and cover a wide range: from total evidence phylogenetics, comparative anatomy and description, to biometry, morphometrics, and macroecology/macroevolutionary processes. However, these are all united under a broad theme of developing quantitative techniques to try to understand evolutionary processes. I am currently working on several projects in the Carnivora, including a large-scale total evidence phylogeny and a project looking to reconstruct rates of evolution through time and across phylogeny. In addition, I have several ongoing efforts in early gnathostome evolution, with the goal of better understanding the ancestral conditions for the last common ancestors to all living jawed vertebrates. The scope of this research spans morphological description, to phylogenetic analysis, to application of comparative methods, to morphometrics. Finally, I have several projects on the diversity dynamics of rodents in western North America, linking patterns of origination and extinction to tectonism (mountain building) and climate change.