Professor Daniel Field
- Strickland Curator of Ornithology
- Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology
- Fellow, Christ's College Cambridge
Contact
Location
- F103 Zoology
About
I am a vertebrate palaeontologist interested in the evolutionary history of birds and other amniotes. Our group's research explores the vertebrate fossil record and organismal biology in a phylogenetic framework to explore how and when extant vertebrate diversity has arisen.
I am originally from Calgary, Alberta, studied Zoology at the University of British Columbia, and received a PhD in Geology and Geophysics from Yale University in 2017. I joined the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge as an Assistant Professor in 2018, received a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship in 2019, and joined the University Museum of Zoology as Strickland Curator of Ornithology in 2021.
Research
Work in my lab aims to decipher the origins of modern avian biodiversity using fossil, anatomical, and molecular data, although we have deep interests in evolutionary questions across the vertebrate tree of life. In 2020 we announced the discovery of Asteriornis maastrichtensis (aka "the Wonderchicken"), the oldest-known modern bird fossil and an early relative of the group that gave rise to living chickens and ducks. Major themes of our research include clarifying how birds survived and diversified following the mass extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, studying the evolutionary histories of major living bird groups, and understanding the evolutionary origins of distinctive biological features such as the modern bird skull.