Philip D. Gingerich

Philip Gingerich is E.C. Case Collegiate Professor of Paleontology and director of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1974, writing a dissertation on stratophenetics as an approach to studying evolution in the fossil record. This was illustrated by high resolution species-level phylogenies in Plesiadapis and other early Cenozoic mammals. Early research on rates of evolution enabled reconciliation of slow change observed comparing fossils with much faster change on an evolutionary-process scale of time. Early research on rates was also an attempt to scale change documented in the fossil record in order to understand how punctuated equilibrium might differ from Darwinian gradualism. In recent years more attention has been given to biotic responses to environmental change at the Paleocene-Eocene epoch boundary, and to early whale evolution as an example of macroevolutionary change from one adaptive zone to another.