Michael Benton

Michael Benton
Michael Benton in 2014, portrait via the Royal Society
Born	Michael James Benton (1956-04-09) April 9, 1956 Scotland
Residence	England
Nationality	British
Fields	Palaeobiology Palaeontology Macroevolution
Institutions	University of Bristol
Alma mater	University of Aberdeen Newcastle University (PhD)
Thesis	The Triassic reptile Hyperodapedon from Elgin, functional morphology and relationships (1981)
Doctoral students	Graeme Lloyd David Pisani Manabu Sakamoto Sarda Sahney
Notable awards	Lyell Medal (2005) FRSE FRS (2014)
Website www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/mike-j-benton

Michael James Benton FRS (born 9 April 1956) is a British palaeontologist, and professor of vertebrate palaeontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. His published work has mostly concentrated on the evolution of Triassic reptiles but he has also worked on extinction events and faunal changes in the fossil record.

Education

Benton was educated at the University of Aberdeen and Newcastle University where he was awarded a PhD in 1981.

Research

Benton's research investigates palaeobiology, palaeontology, and macroevolution. Benton is the author of several palaeontology text books (e.g. Vertebrate Palaeontology) and children's books. He has also advised on many media productions including BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs and was a program consultant for Paleoworld on Discovery Science. His research interests include: diversification of life, quality of the fossil record, shapes of phylogenies, age-clade congruence, mass extinctions, Triassic ecosystem evolution, basal diapsid phylogeny, basal archosaurs, and the origin of the dinosaurs.

Benton has also been contributing in some documentaries. One of these was BBCs 2002 program The Day The Earth Nearly Died, which feature scientists as the deal with the mysteries of the Permian extinction. In December 2010, Benton got a rhynchosaur named Bentonyx in his honour. His work appears in a variety of journals.

Publications

• The phylogeny and classification of the tetrapods (1998, ed. Volumes 1 and 2)
• Prehistoric Animals (1989)
• Vertebrate palaeontology (1st edition, 1990; 2nd edition, 1997; 3rd edition, 2005; 4th edition, 2014)
• On the trail of the dinosaurs (1990)
• The reign of the reptiles (1991)
• The rise of the mammals (1991)
• The fossil record 2 (1993, ed.)
• Dinosaur and Other Prehistoric Animal Fact Finder (1993)
• Fossil reptiles of Great Britain (1995, with P. S. Spencer)
• The Viking atlas of evolution (1997, with R. Osborne)
• The Penguin historical atlas of the dinosaurs (1997)
• Basic Palaeontology (1997, with D. A. T. Harper)
• Walking with dinosaurs: the facts (2000)
• The age of dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia (2000, ed., with D. M. Unwin, M. A. Shishkin and E. N. Kurochkin)
• Permian and Triassic red beds and the Penarth Group of Great Britain (2002, with E. Cook and P. J. Turner)
• When life nearly died: the greatest mass extinction of all time (1st edition, 2003; 2nd edition, 2008)
• Mesozoic and Tertiary fossil mammals and birds of Great Britain (2005, with L. Cook, D. Schreve, A Currant, and J. J. Hooker)
• Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record (2009, with David A.T Harper)
• The first four billion years

Awards and honours

Benton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. His nomination reads:

Michael Benton has made fundamental contributions to understanding the history of life, particularly biodiversity fluctuations through time. He has led in integrating data from living and fossil organisms to generate phylogenies – solutions to the question of how major groups originated and diversified through time. This approach has revolutionised our understanding of major questions, including the relative roles of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on the history of life, whether diversity reaches saturation, the significance of mass extinctions, and how major clades radiate. His research themes: a) diversification of life; b) phylogeny of diapsids and dinosaurs; c) dating the tree of life.