Professor Philip Donoghue

Research summary

My research is focused on the relationship between evolution and embryology, integrating living and fossil organisms, developmental biology, and knowledge of their evolutionary relationships, to provide an holistic understanding of major episodes in evolutionary history.

I have particular interest in the evolutionary emergence of vertebrates, and of ecdysozoans, but also in the evolutionary emergence of animals more generally. This entails classical palaeobiology, but also molecular genetics – to calibrate the Tree of Life to time using molecular clock theory, and to determine the role of genetic regulators of development in effecting organismal-level evolutionary change.

My group has facilities for rock digestion ...

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Links

• Donoghue Lab website

Recent publications

• Cunningham, JA, Thomas, C, Bengtson, S, Kearns, SL, Xiao, S, Marone, F, Stampanoni, M & Donoghue, PCJ 2012, ‘Distinguishing geology from biology in the Ediacaran Doushantuo biota relaxes constraints on the timing of the origin of bilaterians’. Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, vol 279., pp. 2369-2376
• Cunningham, JA, Ruecklin, M, Blom, H, Botella, H & Donoghue, PCJ 2012, ‘Testing models of dental development in the earliest bony vertebrates, Andreolepis and Lophosteus’. Biology Letters, vol 8., pp. 833-837

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View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system