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  • Tom Raven

Tom Raven

Tom started his PhD at the University of Brighton, studying “The Evolution of the Armoured Dinosaurs”, in October 2017, and is supervised by Dr Susannah Maidment, Professor Chris Joyce and Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London. Prior to this, Tom read Geology (MSci) at Imperial College London, graduating with first-class honours in June 2017. During his undergraduate, Tom spent a summer project working with Dr Maidment on a new phylogeny of Stegosauria, which has since been published. His fourth year MSci thesis was on the African stegosaur Paranthodon, work that is currently being prepared for publication.

Email address: T.Raven@brighton.ac.uk

Qualification: PhD

Timeframe: Full-time (three years)

Tom Raven

Thesis title

The Evolution of the Armoured Dinosaurs

My research

Thyreophora, the armoured dinosaurs, are a group of diverse basal ornithischian (bird-hipped) dinosaurs known from the Lower Jurassic to the end of the Cretaceous. Representatives of the group include some of the earliest-known ornithischians, and some members of the clade persisted until the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction. Despite their ubiquity in Jurassic and Cretaceous terrestrial ecosystems, the armoured dinosaurs remain relatively under-studied in comparison with other dinosaur groups. In particular, the origins and early evolution of the two thyreophoran clades, Stegosauria and Ankylosauria, remain contentious, because until recently the computational capacity to analyse very large cladistic datasets was non-existent, and thus the clades have never been examined together in a single phylogenetic analysis.

This project will thus examine the evolutionary history of the thyreophoran dinosaurs by building and analysing the first ever thyreophoran ‘super-matrix’. Data collection will proceed by examination of as many species as possible first-hand in museum collections around the world, and will be supplemented using the literature. Once built, the dataset will be analysed using state-of-the-art computational techniques to reconstruct thyreophoran phylogeny. The phylogeny will then be used to examine the tempo and mode of evolution in thyreophoran dinosaurs.

Funder: University of Brighton scholarship

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Supervisors

Dr Susannah Maidment (University of Brighton)

Professor Paul Barrett (Natural History Museum, London)

Professor Chris Joyce (University of Brighton)

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