Alison CribbUniversity of Southern California | USC · Department of Earth Sciences
Alison Cribb
Bachelor of Arts
About
22
Publications
2,802
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Introduction
I am interested in the context and effects of the evolution of metazoan ecosystem engineering behaviors. I primarily integrate methods in paleoecology, sedimentology, and biogeochemistry to understand how early bioturbation affected sediment biogeochemistry and benthic ecosystems across the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition. I am also interested in ecosystem engineers' responses to mass extinctions, currently with a focus on the end-Permian mass extinction.
Education
August 2018 - May 2023
University of Southern California
Field of study
- Earth Sciences/Geobiology
August 2014 - May 2018
Publications
Publications (22)
The disappearance of the soft-bodied Ediacara biota at the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary potentially represents the earliest mass extinction of complex life, although the precise driver(s) of this extinction remain unresolved. The ‘biotic replacement’ model proposes that an evolutionary radiation of metazoan ecosystem engineers in the latest Ediacara...
The end-Permian mass extinction was the most severe mass extinction event of the Phanerozoic and was followed by a several million-year delay in benthic ecosystem recovery. While much work has been done to understand biotic recovery in both the body and trace fossil records of the Early Triassic, almost no focus has previously been given to analyzi...
Ediacaran fossils from the Nama Group (Kuibis Subgroup) of southern Namibia have a long history of scientific scrutiny, however many of the fossil localities still require investigation from a sedimentary facies and sequence stratigraphic standpoint. Detailed sedimentary analyses utilizing chemostratigraphy and facies-based approaches resulted in f...
The Ediacaran–Cambrian transition marks one of the most important geobiological revolutions in Earth History, including multiple waves of evolutionary radiation and successive episodes of apparent mass extinction. Among the proposed drivers of these events (in particular the extinction of the latest Neoproterozoic ‘Ediacara biota’) is the emergence...
Biotic crises in Earth’s geologic past offer insight into how environmental perturbations affect the composition of functional guilds within ecosystems. Tiering-motility-feeding ecospace occupation analyses (Bambach et al., 2007; Bush et al., 2007) have successfully been used to characterize marine functional ecology, but similar methods have not y...
The disappearance of the soft-bodied Ediacara biota at the Ediacaran–Cambrian boundary potentially represents the earliest mass extinction of complex life, although the precise driver(s) of this extinction remain unresolved. The ‘biotic replacement’ model proposes that an evolutionary radiation of metazoan ecosystem engineers in the latest Ediacara...
Projects
Projects (3)
The goal of this project is to understand the effects of bioturbation on sediment biogeochemistry at the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition, in light of the Cambrian Substrate Revolution. We are integrating trace fossils, geochemistry, and early diagenesis modeling.
The goal of this project is to characterize the behavioral and ecological response of marine ecosystem engineers to mass extinction effects using global datasets of trace fossils and body fossils.
The goal of this project is to use the terminal Ediacaran trace fossil record of the Nama Group, Namibia to understand the timing of the first occurrence of different bioturbation behaviors in order to understand how early bilaterians changed their environments and may have impacted the extinction of the Ediacara Biota.
