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Mr. Alavya Dhungana
(email at alavya.dhungana@durham.ac.uk)
Overview
The Ecdysozoa (which include arthropods and nematode worms) are the most diverse group of animals. The relationships of the Ecdysozoan phyla remain contentious. Cambrian fossils, by virtue of their age and unfamiliar morphological charecteristics may hold the key to establishing the earliest trajectory of the Ecdysozoan clade. For my Leverhulme-funded PhD I'm generating a new, annotated morphological dataset of Cambrian Ecdysozoa in addition to describing and re-evaluating exceptionally preserved fossils.
For my Research Masters at Durham (Stephen Mills scholarship), I created a morphospace of tentacular suspension feeding organisms both extant and fossil (Cambrian), evaluating the inflence of feeding, motility and phylogeny on the morphology of these organisms. I have also been involved with Ediacaran taphonomy and spatial ecology during my undergraduate degree at Cambridge.
Research Groups
Department of Earth Sciences
Research Interests
- Palaeobiology, Ecology & Evolution
Selected Publications
Journal Article
- Mitchell, Emily G., Bobkov, Nikolai, Bykova, Natalia, Dhungana, Alavya, Kolesnikov, Anton V., Hogarth, Ian R. P., Liu, Alexander G., Mustill, Tom M. R., Sozonov, Nikita, Rogov, Vladimir I., Xiao, Shuhai & Grazhdankin, Dmitriy V. (2020). The influence of environmental setting on the community ecology of Ediacaran organisms. Interface Focus 10(4): 20190109.