Extant biodiversity results from a long evolutionary history interspersed by brief and repeated diversification (adaptive radiation) and extinction (crises) events. The study of the fossil record enables us to relate biodiversity dynamics to their palaeogeographic and palaeoenvironmetal contexts, especially regarding long-term environmental changes. By combining phylogeny, paleodiversity, paleoecology, morphology, and morphofunctional approaches, paleontological data provide unique insights into events that influenced the evolution of past ecosystems and how these ecosystems responded to global disturbances. The palaeontology team addresses these questions from the paleocommunity to the macroevolutionary scale. Our research is based on extensive fieldwork across the globe (Southern Europe, Andes-Amazonia-Caribbean, Maghreb, Middle East, West Africa and SE Asia). We focus on the impact of global changes on the evolution of the structure and composition of continental and marine vertebrate communities, and on the conditions that led to modern fauna.
