Michael Caldwell

Biography

As a doctoral student I researched and wrote a thesis on the pattern and process of limb evolution in aquatically adapted reptiles. I studied the limbs of spectacular fossil sea monsters such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, crocodiles and mosasaurs (the only true lizards on this list). While examining specimens in collections at the Natural History Museum in London, I came across some beautiful fossils of a small marine lizard from the English Chalk, Dolichosaurus longicollis , that just happened to be related to the mosasaurs I working on for my thesis. A little bit of research on the topic made it clear that no one had seriously investigated the paleontology and systematics of Dolichosaurus and its kin since the 1920's, and that in particular, this species had not been re-examined since the original description by Sir Richard Owen in 1850. I decided to give it a whirl even though I knew very little about squamates at the time.

Research Interest

Vertebrate palaeontology, i.e., morphology, phylogeny, evolution, and ecology, etc. Organisms of interest include fossil and living squamates (snakes and lizards) as well as of extinct marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. Current research is focused on marine and terrestrial snakes from Cretaceous rocks in the southern hemisphere (Gondwana), the cranial anatomy and phylogeny of extant scolecophidian snakes (blind, burrowing snakes), fossil mosasauroids from Upper Cretaceous rocks in New Zealand, Europe, Africa and North America, terrestrial lizards from the Cretaceous rocks of North America, and the molecular genetics of axial elongation in limb-reduced to limbless tetrapods.