John Alroy is a paleobiologist born in New York in 1966 and now residing in

Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...

, Australia.

Area of expertise

Alroy specializes in diversity curves,

speciation Speciation is the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. The biologist Orator F. Cook coined the term in 1906 for cladogenesis, the splitting of lineages, as opposed to anagenesis, phyletic evolution within ...

, and

extinction Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

of North American fossil mammals and

Phanerozoic The Phanerozoic Eon is the current geologic eon in the geologic time scale, and the one during which abundant animal and plant life has existed. It covers 538.8 million years to the present, and it began with the Cambrian Period, when anima ...

marine

invertebrate Invertebrates are a paraphyletic group of animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''backbone'' or ''spine''), derived from the notochord. This is a grouping including all animals apart from the chordate ...

s, connecting regional and local diversity, taxonomic composition, body mass distributions,

ecomorphology Ecomorphology or ecological morphology is the study of the relationship between the ecological role of an individual and its morphological adaptations. The term "morphological" here is in the anatomical context. Both the morphology and ecology exh ...

, and phylogenetic patterns to intrinsic diversity dynamics, evolutionary trends,

mass extinctions An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of multicellular organisms. It ...

, and the effects of global climate change. In a 3 September 2010 online article by Hugh Collins, a contributor for AOL Online Science, Alroy was quoted in a newly released study paper from Sydney's Macquarie University that "It would be unwise to assume that any large number of species can be lost today without forever altering the basic biological character of Earth's oceans."

Education

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, Committee on Evolutionary Biology, PhD, 1994. *

Reed College Reed College is a private liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland neighborhood, with Tudor-Gothic style architecture, and a forested canyon nature preserve at ...

, Department of Biology, B.A., 1989. *

Hunter College High School Hunter College High School is a secondary school located in the Carnegie Hill neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is administered by Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Hunter is publicly funded, and there i ...

, graduated 1984.

Professional life

Macquarie University Macquarie University ( ) is a public research university based in Sydney, Australia, in the suburb of Macquarie Park. Founded in 1964 by the New South Wales Government, it was the third university to be established in the metropolitan area of S ...

, Future Fellow, 2010–present. *

Marine Science Institute The Marine Science Institute (MSI) is one of seven academic institutes of the University of the Philippines' College of Science. It is housed in its own building complex within the UP Diliman Campus in Quezon City. The Marine Science Institute of ...

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

, Assistant and later Associate Researcher, 2000–2010. *

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) is a research center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara, California. Better known by its acronym, NCEAS (pronounced “n-seas� ...

, Post-doctoral Fellow, 1998–2000, and Center Associate, 2000–2010. *

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

, Research Training Group in the Analysis of Biodiversification, 1994–1996. *

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

, Predoctoral internship, Department of Paleobiology and Evolution of Terrestrial Ecosystems consortium, 1989–1990.

Selected publications

*The shifting balance of diversity among major marine animal groups.

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

329:1191–1194 (2010). *Speciation and extinction in the fossil record of North American mammals. pp. 301–323 in R. Butlin, J. Bridle, and D. Schluter (eds.), Speciation and Patterns of Diversity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2009). *Dynamics of origination and extinction in the marine fossil record. PNAS 105:11536-11542 (2008). *Phanerozoic trends in the global diversity of marine invertebrates.

321:97–100 (with 34 others: 2008). *Statistical independence of escalatory ecological trends in Phanerozoic marine invertebrates.

312:897–900 (with Madin et al.: 2006). *A multispecies overkill simulation of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal mass extinction.

292:1893–1896 (2001). *Global climate change and North American mammalian evolution by John Alroy, Paul L. Koch, and James C. Zachos; The Paleontological Society (2000). *Successive approximations of diversity curves: Ten more years in the library.

Geology Geology () is a branch of natural science concerned with Earth and other astronomical objects, the features or rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which they change over time. Modern geology significantly overlaps all other Ear ...

28:1023–1026 (2000). *Equilibrial diversity dynamics in North American mammals. pp. 232–287 in M. L. McKinney and J. Drake (eds.), Biodiversity Dynamics: Turnover of Populations, Taxa and Communities. Columbia University Press, York (1998). * Cope's rule and the dynamics of body mass evolution in North American mammals.

280:731–734. * Constant extinction, constrained diversification, and uncoordinated stasis in North American mammals.

Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology ''Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology'' ("''Palaeo3''") is a peer-reviewed scientific journal publishing multidisciplinary studies and comprehensive reviews in the field of palaeoenvironmental geology. The journal is edited by T. J. ...

127:285–311 (1996).

Honors

*2010

NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing The NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "to recognize authors whose reviews have synthesized extensive and difficult material, rendering a significant service to science and influencing the course ...

from the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

. *2007 Charles Schuchert Award of the

Paleontological Society The Paleontological Society, formerly the Paleontological Society of America, is an international organisation devoted to the promotion of paleontology. The Society was founded in 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland, and was incorporated in April 1968 in ...

.John Alroy Honored: Paleontological Society Announces 2007 Charles Schuchert Award, UCSB.
/ref> *1994 Romer Prize of the

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) is a professional organization that was founded in the United States in 1940 to advance the science of vertebrate paleontology around the world. Mission and Activities SVP has about 2,300 members inter ...

Appearance event ordination

Appearance Event Ordination (AEO) is a superior form of dating fossil collections, according to Alroy. Age assignments to North American land mammals are provided for comparison and may disagree with the AEO estimates because they are taken straight from published sources. Therefore, the assignments reflect the subjective opinions of the authors who described the fossils. They are not based on quantitative analyses of faunal and

biostratigraphic Biostratigraphy is the branch of stratigraphy which focuses on correlating and assigning relative ages of rock strata by using the fossil assemblages contained within them.Hine, Robert. “Biostratigraphy.” ''Oxford Reference: Dictionary of Bio ...

data. "AEO age estimates are preferable because they are objective, repeatable, and quantitative. That's because AEO uses explicitly recorded and clearly defined numerical data, and because it uses algorithmic search and optimization criteria instead of verbal argumentation."

References

*http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/ University of California, Santa Barbara. {{DEFAULTSORT:Alroy, John American paleontologists Writers from New York City Reed College alumni University of Chicago alumni Living people 1966 births American science writers Paleobiologists Scientists from New York (state)