Aidan Couzens

I have been interested in palaeontology and evolution for as long as I can remember. My first foray into fossil hunting was collecting invertebrate fossils from the Gingin chalk in Western Australia. My interest in fossils led me to study geology and zoology at the University of Western Australia. Around this time I became really interested in mammalian evolution. In my honours year I was fortunate to be able to investigate palaeoenvironmental change during the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinction, as part of a long running project established by Gavin Prideaux. In 2011, I started a PhD focused on understanding how kangaroos adapted to the spread of grasslands through Australian ecosystems. Following my PhD I completed postdocs in the Netherlands and the University of California Los Angeles, the latter focused on the developmental biology of the gray short-tailed opossum. Now at Flinders University, I work on a range of projects broadly oriented around understanding how marsupials adapt to environmental change.