Research interests
My expertise is evolution and diversity of mammals and their environments. This is based on longtime experience in collection work, research, public outreach as well as university teaching on mammal palaeontology. Fossil teeth and bones are my major study objects, which hold a great deal of information on various aspects. I am interested in every biological organisational level be it fauna, species, organism, tissue or genome. The methods used include classics like comparative morphology and anatomy, taxonomy, and stratigraphy, but also cutting-edge analytical techniques in international transdisciplinary collaborative efforts. My ambition is integration of results into existing frameworks of earth and life sciences as well as reconstruction of evolutionary processes which have led to the present biodiversity. A focus of my research are ruminant even-toed mammals (Ruminantia).