Chris Organ

Life on planet earth evolved over billions of years. Of all the species produced in that time, 99% are now extinct. A major challenge in biology is to understand how life works when 99% of our data is missing. I am part of a dynamic research group at the University of Reading who aim to meet this challenge by integrating paleontological and biological data using evolutionary models.

I am broadly interested in the macroevolutionary patterns and processes of vertebrate genome biology, physiology, functional morphology, and ecology. Computational modeling allows my team to integrate data from fossils with extant species to understand how these systems evolve. With this approach, we can now, in the post-genome era, tackle new questions about genotypes and phenotypes in long-extinct species and their evolution across deep time. My research seizes this opportunity to study major evolutionary transformations across levels of biological organization, from genes and genomes to morphology and behavior.