For my Postdoc in Bochum, I study belemnites, which suffer from similar problems as other groups of fossil cephalopods in that phylogenetic methods are rarely applied. The goal of this project is to better understand the evolutionary relationships of belemnites and their relationships to other coleoids based on modern quantitative methods.
This project involves a taxonomic description of cephalopods from the late Cambrian to earliest Ordovician of western Queensland, Australia, together with a major revision of some of these taxa.
During my MSc and PhD, I studied the non-ammonoid cephalopods (“nautiloids”) from the Devonian of the eastern Anti-Atlas (Morocco), covering a range of topics such as taxonomy, reproductive strategies and body size.
The phylogenetic relationships of the various groups of early Palaeozoic “nautiloid” cephalopods were unclear for a long time. Together with an international team of colleagues, I carried out the first phylogenetic analysis of these taxa, applying modern Bayesian methods.
While orthoceratoids are most commonly associated with the Palaeozoic, they were still widespread during the Triassic. In the past 100 years, there had been little research progress on these taxa. In this small project, we described orthoceratoids and superficially similar coleoids from the Middle Triassic of Switzerland and provided a revised taxonomic framework for Triassic orthoceratoids more generally.