Animals (the biological group of organisms containing everything from sponges, jellyfish and snails to worms, insects and ourselves) are one of the major Kingdoms of life on Earth, but they only evolved around 600 million years ago.

This talk will introduce fossils of the enigmatic ‘Ediacaran biota’, which preserve our oldest records of early animal life, and will explain what we currently know about how and when animals diversified to ultimately dominate the planet. Along the way we will visit field sites both remote and familiar, and meet a variety of weird and wonderful fossils that provide unique and unexpected insights into our ancient past.

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Alex is an Associate Professor in Palaeobiology at the University of Cambridge where he researches the origin and early evolution of animals, and the interplay between biological and geological events throughout Earth's history. He trained as an Earth Scientist, obtaining undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Oxford, before spending time as a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge and Bristol, and taking up his faculty position in Cambridge in 2016.

In addition to conducting fieldwork all over the world to find new fossils that allow us to track early animal evolution, his research group also conducts laboratory, analytical and big-data studies to better understand aspects of fossil preservation, ecological structure and physical and chemical environmental conditions during the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods of geological time.