The first animals to crawl onto land left faint trails in ancient mud, and this project will use computer simulations and statistical analysis to identify those earliest footprints. This matters because palaeontologists have long debated when and how animals first moved from water to land—a pivotal transition in evolutionary history. The problem is that the oldest potential terrestrial traces are ambiguous; they could have been made underwater or on microbial mats. Current methods cannot reliably distinguish between these environments. The researcher will build a new quantitative framework for ichnology—the study of trace fossils—by combining computational fluid dynamics with discrete element modelling to simulate how different animals create tracks in mud, sand, and microbial mats. A scaling law will then link trace instability (a signature of terrestrial movement) to animal size, speed, and sediment properties. This law will be applied to controversial Ediacaran and Cambrian fossils. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. However, understanding how early animals colonised land illuminates the evolutionary constraints on locomotion and sensory systems—knowledge that could one day inform bio-inspired robotics or the interpretation of extraterrestrial surface features.
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This proposal aims to address an important long-standing palaeontological question concerning the timing and nature of the animals who undertook the earliest explorations on land in Earth's history. The main focus of this proposal is to use trace fossils, combined with cutting-edge theoretical and numerical approaches, to identify the earliest traces left by the movement of animals on land, to determine their putative trace makers, and to establish their mobility and sensory capabilities. This work will involve integrating concepts and methods from mathematics and computational mechanics with palaeontological and sedimentological approaches, thereby establishing a new quantitative ichnological framework. To achieve this I will: (1) use statistical approaches to establish a set of metrics that can quantitatively identify the producer of trace fossils; (2) establish a semi-resolved coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics-Discrete Element Method to reproduce trace formation on land, under water and on microbial mats; (3) conduct a dimensional analysis to find out the scaling law relating trace fossil instability (an indicator of terrestrial traces), animal mobility and environmental parameters; and finally (4) use the obtained scaling law to investigate putative terrestrial traces from the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. This project will enhance research in the area of quantitative ichnology, with broad implications in the Earth sciences, evolutionary biology and ethology. This project will enable me to develop as an independent interdisciplinary researcher working across palaeontology, computational mechanics and evolutionary biology, ultimately allowing me to establish my own international research team.
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