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ALBANY, NY - New York State Paleontologist Dr. Ed Landing has received a $180,532 National Science Foundation Grant to study important evolutionary events that took place 510 million years ago, the New York State Museum announced today.

Dr. Landing's grant, which will be dispersed over three years, will fund a collaborative study with Dr. Samuel A. Bowring of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The scientists will focus on the evolution of animals in a time interval known as the Early to Middle Cambrian periods. They will examine ancient volcanic ashes to determine high precision uranium-lead ages. They will be able to quantify rates of evolutionary change in fossil marine animals. These evolutionary changes will be related to global sea-level rises and falls and a possible interval of rapid "continental drift" in the Lower and Middle Cambrian periods that shifted a number of ancient continents from the tropics to sub-polar latitudes.

"We're putting together the precise chronology, and for the first time figuring out the rates of evolution for the earliest animals," Landing said.

This work will build on previous NSF-supported research by Dr. Landing in the eastern U.S., Maritime Canada, Britain, Sweden, Morocco and the Middle East. Those areas all show important faunal changes and evidence of important sea level fluctuations from the Early to Middle Cambrian. The current research will most likely take the scientists to New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Morocco, Wales and England.

Dr. Landing has worked at the State Museum since 1981. He was recently featured in Earth Story, a series of documentaries produced by the British Broadcasting Corp. for the Learning Channel that described geological forces that made the earth what it is today. Dr. Landing serves as the curator of the State Museum's large paleontology collection.

He earned a bachelors of science from the University of Wisconsin. He holds a Masters and a PhD from the University of Michigan.

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