Steven Zhang

I completed degrees in palaeontology at the University of Bristol at undergraduate and PhD levels. During which I specialised in the evolution and fossil history of proboscideans – the group that contains elephants and their extinct cousins such as mammoths, mastodonts, stegodonts and deinotheres. My further research interests include evolutionary responses of large mammal communities to past shocks to the Earth’s climate. Eager to tell the stories of these outlandish prehistoric beasts, I have conducted palaeontological outreach activities in museums and consulted for several television documentaries.

In sum, my research strives to answer why we have only three species of elephants on Earth today but over 100 species of antelopes, as for much of the past 15 million years outsized herbivores like elephants, rhinos and giraffes were far more diverse and widespread across the Earth's ecosystems than today. This begs a more fundamental question about the extent to which the biosphere's baseline conditions underwent dramatic upheaval in recent geological history. My ongoing work examines these questions by reconstructing the evolutionary trajectories of large mammal species and the ecological communities they inhabited.