Nicolas Campione Ruben

Nic’s research combines traditional palaeontological practices, such as field-based and taxonomic research, with quantitative techniques to explore biology in the fossil record. The fossil record can tell us much about anatomical variation in the past and the changes that such variation has undergone over time; a direct record of evolution. However, it is much more difficult to interpret why variation changes or the factors that drove it. To this end, Nic adopts a suite of morphometric and phylogenetic techniques to define ranges of morphological variation in the fossil record and correlate these with ecologically-relevant data from the living record. To date, his research has contributed new knowledge on the nature and evolution of dinosaur body size, the origin of feathers in dinosaurs, and the extinction/recovery patterns of sharks across the end-Cretaceous extinction.

 

Although dinosaurs continue to drive much of Dr Campione’s research, his research group study anatomical variation in an array of organisms, including sharks, mammals, and invertebrates. Along with UNE colleague Dr Phil Bell, he runs the Boreal Alberta Dinosaur Project, exploring Late Cretaceous vertebrate diversity from the north-western part of the province of Alberta, Canada.