Paleobiogeography has emerged as a truly multi-disciplinary field, combining phylogenetics, diversity and taxonomy, GIS methods, stratigraphy, and the geological history of the area into a integrative field that can yield not only reconstructions of the past, but also insight into processes of evolution.

My research has focused on the Malvinokaffric Realm, an area of seas and bays around the southern pole during the Devonian, flanked by the Gondwanan supercontinent. The highly endemic fauna of the Malvinokaffric Realm inhabited cooler waters during the time, showing little admixture with Eastern Realm to the north. The calmoniid trilobites dominated the time, expanding as a speciose, successful group before succumbing to the Late Devonian mass extinction.

Biogeography and speciation

Understanding the patterns of distributional change of taxa can yield possible information on the speciation process at work. A vicariance event, through the formation of a barrier, perhaps due to sea level rise (as on the right) would cause a speciation event in which the descendent's range (A1 and B1) are contracted from the ancestor's range (A). An event that causes the range of the taxa to expand from an ancestral range to the descendent's range could be due to joining of areas (geodispersal). Further cyclical joining and separation of areas could yield many opportunities for speciation. The phylogeny should reflect these complex distributional changes given complex speciation due to abiotic events isolating and joining areas.