About this Event
You are invited to the Royal Society of South Australia meeting and scientific presentation for April 2024. Join us Thursday April 11th to hear our speaker Aiden Couzens (Flinders University) presenting on marsupial evolution.
Please note that the talk will start at 6:30 pm but nibbles, refreshments and networking are between 6:00 - 6:30 pm. Pre-talk nibbles and refreshments available by small donation.
We will hold this as an in-person event in our Society rooms, but we will simultaneously live-stream the meeting via Zoom for those not in attendance or for interested non-members.
To attend either in person, or online, you MUST REGISTER VIA EVENTBRITE. The zoom link will be sent to you on registration. Please feel free to share this event with your institution or networks.
If in-person tickets are sold out, please be aware that we are unable to admit more people than our room capacity. If online tickets are sold out, please contact [email protected] and we can supply the zoom link to you.
For more information on the location of the RSSA rooms, please visit https://www.rssa.org.au/contact/
Talk title: Insights into the Predictability of Evolution from Marsupials
Abstract: The marsupials are one of three groups of living mammals, alongside the monotremes (echidna and platypus) and placentals (the group to which we belong). Today, marsupials are mainly restricted to Australasia and South America and account for only around 5% of extant mammal diversity, whereas their sister radiation, the placentals are globally distributed and constitute the vast bulk of living mammals. Here, using the fossil record and data on the developmental biology of living marsupials I discuss the potentially important role that chance played in shaping the very different histories of marsupial and placental mammals.
Bio: Aiden has been interested in palaeontology and evolution for as long as he can remember. This interest and his early forays into fossil hunting, collecting invertebrate fossils from the Gingin chalk in Western Australia, led him to study geology and zoology at the University of Western Australia. It was around this time that he became interested in mammalian evolution and completed his honours year investigating palaeoenvironmental change during the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinction with Professor Gavin Prideaux. In 2011, he began his PhD on how kangaroos adapted to the spread of grasslands through Australian ecosystems. Following this, Aiden completed postdocs in the Netherlands and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the latter focusing on the developmental biology of the gray short-tailed opossum. Having now returned to Flinders University, Aiden works on a range of projects broadly oriented around understanding how marsupials adapt to environmental change.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Royal Society of South Australia, North Terrace, Adelaide, Australia
AUD 0.00