Dr Roper-Smith is both taxonomically and temporally agnostic, having tackled questions regarding the evolutionary histories of fungi, molluscs, brachiopods, jawed vertebrates, and more. The thread that connects these studies is his interest in finding new ways to disentangle the macroevolutionary patterns preserved by the fossil record from the artefacts of decay, fossilisation, sampling, and experimental design that distort them. Across different projects, he has attempted to do this in different ways. In some, he has developed new approaches for standardising empirical data, whilst in others he has used eco-evolutionary simulations to constrain the range of possible outcomes for different sources of bias.
Currently, Dr Roper-Smith has three major streams of research that focus on:
- The role of competitive displacement in the brachiopod-bivalve transition.
- Diversification dynamics before, during, and after the Cambrian explosion.
- General patterns in organismal morphological variety and the processes that shape them.
CV:
Dr Roper-Smith is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Prior to this, he worked in the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Oxford with Professor Erin Saupe on the brachiopod-bivalve transition as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant (2022-2025). He completed his Ph.D. on general patterns and biases in analyses of morphological variety at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Professors Philip Donoghue and Davide Pisani (2018-2022).
Selected Publications
Smith, T. J., Parry, L. A., Dunn, F. S. and Garwood, R. J. (2024). Exploring the macroevolutionary impact of ecosystem engineers using an individual-based eco-evolutionary simulation. Palaeontology 67, e12701. https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12701
Johnson, E., Margulis-Ohnuma, M., Smith, T. J., Butts, S. H., Lutz, C. and Briggs, D. E. G. (2024). Morphotype matters: an experimental analysis of the morphological fidelity of gastropod steinkerns. Palaios 39, 225-232. http://dx.doi.org/10.2110/palo.2023.041
Smith, T. J., Sansom, R. S., Pisani, D. and Donoghue, P. C. J. (2023). Fossilization can mislead analyses of phenotypic disparity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences 290, 20230522. http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.0522
Smith, T. J. and Donoghue, P. C. J. (2022). Evolution of fungal phenotypic disparity. Nature Ecology & Evolution 6, 1489-1500. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01844-6
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2083-7452
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