Simon Darroch

Feedback from editors and reviewers of academic journals is an often-understated driver of new research directions. Assistant Professor of Earth and environmental sciences Simon Darroch, found this to be the case for his new paper examining the differences between geographic ranges of species historic and living. Read More

Members of the Evolutionary Studies Initiative took a field trip to Coon Creek Science Center (CCSC) to dig for fossils. Read More

Looking at prehistoric organisms allows Simon Darroch and his students to describe how, when and why complex life evolved on this planet. Their work is a piece of the puzzle in understanding how likely it is that we’ll find complex life beyond Earth. Read More

Vanderbilt environmental scientists show that patterns found in fossil records of ancient ecosystems may be the key to combating today’s biodiversity crisis and making informed conservation decisions. Read More

Kids and lifelong learners can hear directly from paleontologists about bizarre creatures of the past during a free virtual National Fossil Day event on Saturday, Oct. 10, at 10 a.m. CT. Registration is required. Read More

“They are behaving like animals, and that’s a link between them and what we recognize as animals," says paleontologist Simon A.F. Darroch. Read More

The team, one of the first in the world to examine the ability’s origins, used a small CT scanner to look inside a 30-million-year-old ear bone fossil from a specimen resembling Olympicetus avitus. Read More

Ediacara biota were forming complex communities tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion. Read More

In "The Conversation," Vanderbilt paleontologist Simon Darroch explains how computational fluid dynamics can help researchers understand some of the earliest life on Earth. Read More

An interdisciplinary study suggests the strange creatures that lived in the Garden of the Ediacaran more than 540 million years ago may have been much more dynamic than experts have thought. Read More

Artificial kidneys, gay-straight alliances and junkyard batteries captured readers' attention in 2016. Read More

New fossil evidence strengthens the proposition that the world’s first mass extinction was caused by ‘ecosystem engineers’ – newly evolved organisms that radically altered the environment. Read More

With discoveries ranging from the origins of consciousness to the end of the universe, 2015 was a year of incredibly diverse research at Vanderbilt University. Read More

The Earth's first mass extinction event 540 million years ago was caused not by a meteorite impact or volcanic super-eruption, but by the rise of early animals that dramatically changed to prehistoric environment. Read More