Welcome to the Research Laboratory of Professor Karen Samonds

My lab broadly studies anatomical sciences, paleontology and biogeographic questions. My paleontological research is focused on the origin and evolutionary history of Madagascar’s modern fauna, one of the most unique and endemic on the planet. How, when, and from where they arrived on the island has remained largely unknown due to a 65 million year gap in the fossil record that occurs precisely within the time period during which the modern vertebrate groups are hypothesized to have colonized the island. My research has sought to fill in this “gap” in a number of different ways.