Dr Andrews is a research worker in human and primate evolution, palaeoecology of Neogene environments, and taphonomy of vertebrate bones. He worked at the Natural History Museum, London, where he was Head of Human Origins until his retirement in the year 2000. Since then he has been the curator of Blandford Museum while retaining emeritus positions at the Natural History Museum and the Universities of London and York. He has written and edited ten books and more than 200 articles in the scientific and popular press. At Blandford Museum he heads a team of one deputy curator (Dr Michael le Bas) and three assistant curators (Philip Le Bas, Carolyn Martin and Jack Greaves), and together they are responsible for the day to day running of the museum, the development and installation of exhibits, and managing the collections.

Fossil Primates - Peter’s long over-due papers on his Turkish site at Pasalar finally came out. More recently he has been working on the description of a new species of Miocene ape from Kenya with Terry Harrison. This is one of the earliest apes known at present and it has been assigned to a new species of Proconsul. We named it Proconsul meswae after the name of the locality (Meswa Bridge) near Muhoroni in western Kenya. He has also been working on the taphonomy of the main fossil plant site on Rusinga Island, also in Kenya. Field work on this site was completed in 1980, when he worked there with Margaret Collinson, but the addition of Marion Bamford saw the work through to its final conclusion. Both these papers have recently (2010)been published in the Journal of Human Evolution. He has also published a paper with Rick Johnson on the significance of the uricase gene in human evolution.

Taphonomy - Peter has also been working on the Atlas of Taphonomy with Yolanda Fernandez-Jalvo. This is a work long in preparation, but it has gone through the review process and we are now revising the manuscript. Other work with Yolanda in 2010/2011 includes a paper on the importance of taphonomy to palaeoecology, and the second of a series of papers on the monitoring of taphonomic specimens in Wales, and this has been published. This work is based on a 25 year study of an area of wild moorland in Wales (shown here)  to investigate what happens to animal bones in this kind of climate and environment. Another taphonomic project is a paper on the small mammals of Karain Cave in Turkey with Arzu Gungor, one of the last of Peter’s students in Turkey. In addition, Peter has recently published a paper on the taphonomy of Rudabanya, Hungary, the result of field work with David Cameron now working in Australia, the taphonomy of fossil plants in Miocene deposits on Rusinga Island, Kenya, with Margaret Collinson and Marion Bamford, and a paper on a late glacial and early Holocene hunter-gatherer site in the Colne Valley with Barbara Ghaleb. Finally, he is presently working on the descriptions of the Bronze Age round barrows at Longstone Edge, Derbyshire, describing the taphonomic and site formation processes for this site.

Palaeoecology - On the ecology front, Peter has two papers published recently on the ecology and palaeoecology of the Laetoli area of Tanzania, one of them with Marion Bamford of the University of the Witwatersrand and the other with Kristin Kovarovic, University of Durham; the fossil wood site at Noiti, west of Laetoli is shown here.

A third paper on mammal species richness in Africa was published with Bonnie O’Brien, University of Georgia. This work consists of analyzing numbers of species in 16 ecological categories of recent mammals to identify patterns of distribution in relation to climate and vegetation. Some of the results are quite surprising, with some groups of mammals being much more highly correlated with vegetation changes than others.

The two maps shown here are of the species richness patterns of fruit eating mammals (left) and browsing herbivores (right). The two Laetoli papers were published in a book on the results of field work at Laetoli, and they document the ecology and palaeoecology of the site. The African diversity paper came out in a monumental book on the palaeontology of Africa. Finally he has co-authored two papers on Azokh Cave in Nagorno Karabage where he is working with an international team from Spain, Ireland, UK and Armenia.
CV and Publications [PDF]

Sylvia Hixson Andrews - Education/Website/Newsletter

Carole Argles - Archiving

Dr Michael Le Bas

Research Interests - Mineralogy and geochemistry of the Carlingford Tertiary volcanic complex, Ireland 1957-1962

Research Council Joint leader with Prof Basil King (London University) East African Alkaline Volcanic Rift Valley Project, 1963-1970

Nomenclature and classification of igneous rocks, (UNESCO) 1978-2002

NATO-funded Cape Verde Islands (Central Atlantic) Volcanic Research Group, 1980-1986

Royal Society Joint Leader Bayan Obo REE-Fe-Nb N China project with Prof Zhang Peishan, (Beijing Academica Sinica) 1988-1993

Royal Society Joint Principal Investigator with Prof Andrei Bulakh (St Petersburg University) for project “Geochemistry of Khibina and related carbonatites, Kola Peninsula, N Russia” 1990-1996

CV and Publications