Lucy graduated with an MEarthSci in Earth Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2024. Her Master's project used X-ray computed tomography and segmentation to reveal the preserved internal anatomy of a 460 million year-old fossil rhombiferan echinoderm (an extinct relative of modern starfish and sea urchins). This project, and a previous internship investigating another group of extinct echinoderms called stylophorans, instilled into her a fascination with unusual fossil echinoderm groups and the evolutionary history of the phylum.
Following on from this interest, Lucy's PhD project aims to reveal the evolutionary patterns at the origin of the echinoderm phylum during the 'Cambrian explosion'. To investigate this, computed tomography is being used to make new 3D morphological observations of Cambrian echinoderm fossils from museum collections around the world. These observations are being assembled into a new morphological character matrix which is being analysed using state-of-the-art phylogenetic methods.
Her PhD is part of the strategic partnership between the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) and the University of Reading (UoR). She is supervised by Imran Rahman (NHM), Tim Ewin (NHM), Andrew Meade (UoR), Chris Venditti (UoR) and Frankie Dunn (OUMNH).
