Mesozoic Tetrapods
Oliver Rauhut Lab

Having grown up in the westernmost city of Germany, the ancient city of Aachen, I studied Geology and Palaeontology at the Free University of Berlin from 1990 to 1995. My Diploma thesis under the supervision of Bernard Krebs was on a dinosaur fauna from the Cretaceous of Sudan. In 1996, I moved to the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, UK, with an EU Marie Curie fellowship to do a PhD on theropod interrelationships under the supervision of David Unwin, which I finished in early 2000. A two year DAAD postdoctoral fellowship at the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Argentina was to become decisive for my future career, as the fieldwork projects started in the Jurassic of Chubut Province during this time are still one focus of my research, and started my dedicated research interest in the evolution of Jurassic vertebrates. After my return to Germany in January 2003, I worked at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin for one and a half years, before I got a position as curator of lower vertebrates at the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in Munich, Bavaria. Since 2007 I furthermore hold a position as adjunct professor at the Department for Earth and Environmental Sciences of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, where I also do active teaching in the framework of the MSc course in Geo- and Palaeobiology.

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Research interests

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My general research interest is the evolution of vertebrates during the Mesozoic. More specifically, I am interested in the response of Jurassic terrestrial vertebrate faunas to the changing geography and climatic conditions during that period. Another focus of my research is in the anatomy, systematics, phylogeny, and evolution of saurischian dinosaurs.

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Scientific publications

Popular science papers and technical comments

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