Tom Chilton

Biography and research

I am looking at how Lepidosaurs, a superorder of reptiles, responded to the K-Pg, the extinction event that famously killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Whether certain traits positively or negatively impacted survival rates and how long it took for diversity to recover after the extinction event.

I have always been interested in reptiles, and did my undergraduate here at the University of York, where I completed my undergraduate dissertation on the effect of temperature on viper speciation. From there I became interested in the effects of climate events on the macroevolution of organisms in particular reptiles.