A paper published this week, in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, led by Dr Tasnuva Ming Khan, Deep-time Ecology Group, supports the theory that there was a single extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period in Antarctica, due to a catastrophic asteroid impact, rather than gradual extinction running up to it due to volcanic activity.
Dr Khan’s research focused on ecological complexity in fossils of Antarctic seafloor organisms in the 4 million years prior to the global mass extinction event. The fossils she studied were collected in the early 1980s and are held by the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) in Ithaca, New York.
Why museums matter
It was through historic museum collections, in particular the Zinsmeister Collection at the PRI, that Dr Khan developed an appreciation of Antarctica in deep time.
Museums are essential to palaeontology because they hold collections of fossils which are our only source of information about ancient life on earth. This record exists as both physical, material specimens and as the abstracted data we derive from them. Museums are key to both types of record, as collections can be used to discover new ideas, check previously published results, view type specimens (the "authority" for all described species), and allow reproducible science. Museums and collection data are assuming even more importance to palaeontology as the field enters the era of ‘big data’ through palaeontological databases.
Dr Khan’s research journey
Dr Khan’s connection to the PRI’s Museum of the Earth began when she volunteered there as undergraduate at Cornell University. She was particularly fascinated by the Zinsmeister Collection of Antarctic fossils, basing her senior thesis on it. As she trawled through related literature, names like “Whittle” and “Witts” became familiar ones.
Two years later, at the height of the pandemic in 2020, Dr Khan was submitting PhD applications. When she tweeted, “Done with PhD applications!”, Dr Emily Mitchell here in Zoology, liked her tweet. Dr Khan noticed that Dr Mitchell had advertised a project to study the Antarctic seafloor, and that the supervision committee included Dr Rowan Whittle – the same Whittle whose works Dr Khan had read during her undergraduate studies.
She immediately applied, ten days before the application deadline. She was successful and so came to Cambridge to study for her PhD, based here in Zoology and at the British Antarctic Survey. Her supervisory committee - Dr Emily Mitchell, Prof Andrea Manica (Zoology), Dr. Huw Griffiths, Dr. Rowan Whittle (BAS) - leveraged her interest in deep time to explore a temporal component to the Antarctic seafloor PhD, culminating in this week's paper. The study also involved Dr James Witts (Natural History Museum) and aligned with Dr Whittle's UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship: the past, present, and future of unique cold-water seafloor communities in the Southern Ocean.
Dr Khan was awarded her PhD here in Zoology in October 2025.
Read more: Tasnuva Ming Khan, Rowan J. Whittle, James D. Witts, Huw J. Griffiths, Andrea Manica, Emily G. Mitchell, Metacommunity structural changes of Antarctic benthic invertebrates over the late Maastrichtian, (2026) Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 683, 113495, ISSN 0031-0182, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2025.113495
Image: Dr Khan delightedly exploring drawers of fossils at the Paleontological Research Institute during her PhD research, August 2022.