James D. Holmes

My research uses the exceptional fossil record of trilobites—extinct marine arthropods similar to modern crustaceans—to explore aspects of early animal evolution. At present, I am primarily interested in how morphological diversity (or ‘disparity’) was established in the earliest trilobites across their initial radiation commencing at c. 521 Ma, and what this can tell us more generally about the sudden appearance of animal life known as the Cambrian ‘explosion’.