Overview

Dr. Gregory P. Dietl is Director of Collections at the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI) and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. Before coming to PRI and Cornell he was a Donnelley Environmental Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University.

Research Focus

My research approach is at the interface between ecology and evolutionary paleoecology. It is very much multidisciplinary in nature, integrating interests across diverse fields of organismal biology. I conduct specimen-based paleontological and ecological fieldwork, manipulative behavioral experiments with living animals, and have used geochemical and molecular techniques in my research to address evolutionary questions with significance in conservation biology. In particular, I focus on the evolution of species interactions using the molluscan fossil record of the last few million years due to its unrivalled preservation and diversity, and because the biology of fossil species this age is reasonably well understood. I am particularly interested in looking at the history of life from an economic point of view. My interests are united by the belief that many important questions are best answered with an understanding of how evolution is governed by phenomena common to all economic (ecological) systems?disturbance, selection and adaptation, constraint and opportunity, feedback, emergence and self-organization. A major focus of my current research program centers on efforts in the emerging field of Conservation Paleobiology. As humans continue to transform the world's ecosystems, and the life-sustaining services and goods that they provide us, through the loss of species, fragmentation of habitats and global redistribution of species, among other influences, we are increasingly re-creating conditions not unlike those of past extinctions. How will species respond to such changes in their environment? I believe that information from past environmental states, both like and unlike those of the present day, provide the empirically grounded framework needed to understand the circumstances necessary to nurture sustainability and creative experimentation.

Instruction Focus

Evolutionary Paleoecology, Conservation Paleobiology

Additional Links

• PRI About Us

Selected Publications

• Dietl, G. P. 2008. Selection, security, and evolutionary international relations. Pp. 87-101 In: Darwinian Security, R. Sagarin and T. Taylor (ed.), Univ. of California Press.
• Vermeij, G. J. & G. P. Dietl. 2006. Majority rule: adaptation and the long-term dynamics of species. Paleobiology, 32: 173-178.
• Dietl, G. P. & J. Hendricks. 2006. Crab scars reveal survival advantage of left-handed snails. Royal Society, Biology Letters 2(3): 439-442.
• Dietl, G. P., G. S. Herbert & G. J. Vermeij, 2004. Reduced competition and altered feeding behavior among marine snails after a mass extinction. Science, 306: 2229-2231.
• Dietl, G. P., 2004. Origins and circumstances of adaptive divergence in whelk feeding behavior. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 208: 279-291.
• Dietl, G. P. 2003. Coevolution of a marine gastropod predator and its dangerous bivalve prey. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 80: 409-436.
• Dietl, G. P., P. H. Kelley, R. Barrick & W. Showers, 2002. Escalation and extinction selectivity: Morphology versus isotopic reconstruction of bivalve metabolism. Evolution, 56: 284-291.
• Dietl, G. P. & P. H. Kelley, 2002. The fossil record of predator-prey arms races: Coevolution and escalation hypotheses. In: The Fossil Record of Predation, Kowalewski, M., & Kelley, P. (eds.). Paleontological Society Papers 8: 353-374.

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