Paul J. Morris' Home Page (original) (raw)

PJM On Anthill in Zaire, 1988

Biodiversity Informatics Manager at The Harvard University Herbaria and The Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Also, President and CEO of Athro, Limited

Voice Phone Number: 617-495-2823
E-mail Address: mole@morris.net

Postal Address:

14 Lovers Lane
Harvard, MA 01451
USA

Research Interests

I am an invertebrate paleontologist, specializing in the evolutionary history of snails. Currently, I mostly work in Biodiversity Informatics.

  1. Biodiversity Informatics: Biological collections (in natural history museums, herbaria, and other such institutions) are vast libraries of our knowledge of living and fossil organisms. Digitizing the information in these collections, appling quality control to this informtion, making it available to the world, data mining and finding patterns in this information, and keeping the collections vital by bringing new information back into them are critical aspects of biodiversity informatics. Among other work in the discipline, I'm Co-PI on the Filtered Push project - an effort to build an infrastructure to allow remote annotation of specimens in natural history collections.
  2. Paleoecology: The fossil record is, in essence, a 3.5 billion year long record of the responses of organisms to environmental change. I am using several (snail rich) fossil systems to examine the relationships between environmental change, ecological change, and evolutionary change. These include Pliocene rift lake deposits from the Edward-Mobutu basin of Zaire and Uganda as well as Paleogene shallow marine deposits from the US Gulf Coastal Plain, especially the Wilcox group of Alabama. In all of these systems, I am interested in both paleontological tests for the presence of patterns of coordinated stasis, and broader multidisciplinary approaches to testing hypotheses for causal relationships between environmental and biotic change.
  3. Functional Morphology: I believe that the conceptual framework of functional morphology - that is, consideration of contributions of phylogenetic history, functional adaptation, and constructional constraints - is the central intellectual tool for understanding biological systems. I, of course, apply this to snails and seek to understand the modes of life and evolutionary history of the earliest snails. In addition, I have examined the utility of this approach to to systems outside its traditional realm of the anatomy of organisms. The case that I have examined in the greatest detail is evidences that sponges and all other animals share a single common multicellular ancestor, as evidenced in similarities in the molecules and developmental role of the extracellular matrix.

A translation of Louis Agassiz's clearest statement on darwinian evolution, a chapter on Darwinism and Haeckel's classifications that he added to the 1869 french translation of the Essay on Classification.

A data model for paleontological occurance information (from 1998).

A poster from TDWG 2007, on Challenges and tradeoffs in the management of geological context data in paleontological collections. Proceedings of TDWG Abstract and Poster (OpenDocument)

A primer on Relational database design for Biodiversity Informatics.

Publications

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Written by Paul J. Morris mole@morris.net
Mantained by Athro LimitedDate Created: Oct 1995
Last Updated: 2008 Dec 27