Laura Jane Cotton

Laura Jane Cotton

Tenure Track Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor and Curator of Palaeontology

 

I am interested in the interactions between shallow marine ecosystems and climate change over the last 65 million years (Cenozoic). My research integrates multiple records of invertebrate fossils, along with geochemistry and modern physiology on a variety of temporal and geographic scales, to understand the changes taking place in shelf ecosystems to major climate perturbations.

Whilst I work on a diverse range of organisms, my specialty is the larger benthic foraminifera (LBF), these are single celled organisms with a calcareous shell that can reach sizes of >10 cm in diameter. They live in warm shallow seas, and harbor symbionts, similarly to corals, and as such are excellent organisms for examining response of reef-type environments to climate events of the past.

 

 

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