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Paul Smith is an invertebrate paleontologist and stratigrapher. He received his Ph.D. from McMaster University in 1981 and is currently Head of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at the University of British Columbia. His main areas of research include aspects of paleobiogeography such as the time of opening of the Hispanic Corridor which linked the Tethyan Ocean to the eastern Pacific during some intervals in the Early Jurassic as well as unlocking the jigsaw of terrane displacements which make up the Canadian Cordillera. He is involved in establishing an ammonite zonation for the Jurassic of North America which is calibrated using U-Pb geochronology. Paul is involved in improving resolution of faunas across the end-Triassic mass extinction event in order to improve understanding of the dynamics of recovery and he pioneered the ammonite database “AMMON” to track morphological change in species and communities in space and time. |
