Staff profile

Overview

The Ecdysozoa (which include arthropods and nematode worms) are the most diverse group of animals. The relationships of the Ecdysozoan phyla remain contentious. Cambrian fossils, by virtue of their age and unfamiliar morphological charecteristics may hold the key to establishing the earliest trajectory of the Ecdysozoan clade. For my Leverhulme-funded PhD I'm generating a new, annotated morphological dataset of Cambrian Ecdysozoa in addition to describing and re-evaluating exceptionally preserved fossils.

For my Research Masters at Durham (Stephen Mills scholarship), I created a morphospace of tentacular suspension feeding organisms both extant and fossil (Cambrian), evaluating the inflence of feeding, motility and phylogeny on the morphology of these organisms. I was introduced to research during my undergraduate at Cambridge where I worked on Ediacaran spatial ecology and taphonomy, which has led to further collaborations both in Ediacaran palaeobiology and applying spatial analyses in the Phanerozoic fossil record. 

• Palaeobiology, Ecology & Evolution

• Palaeoecosystems Research Group

Journal Article

• Dhungana, Alavya & Mitchell, Emily G. (2021). Facilitating corals in an early Silurian deep‐water assemblage. Palaeontology 64(3): 359-370.
• Mitchell, Emily G., Bobkov, Nikolai, Bykova, Natalia, Dhungana, Alavya, Kolesnikov, Anton V., Hogarth, Ian R. P., Liu, Alexander G., Mustill, Tom M. R., Sozonov, Nikita, Rogov, Vladimir I., Xiao, Shuhai & Grazhdankin, Dmitriy V. (2020). The influence of environmental setting on the community ecology of Ediacaran organisms. Interface Focus 10(4): 20190109.