Rate My Professor Loren Babcock

Loren Babcock is a Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University, a key figure in Geoscience, and Director of the Orton Geological Museum. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1990. His research focuses principally on the early history of multicellular animals, notably trilobites; biotic changes across the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition; Cambrian global chronostratigraphy; processes of fossilization; and evolutionary paleobiology topics including the role of predation in evolution and the evolutionary history of biologic asymmetry. Through studies of Lagerstätten, Babcock examines critical evolutionary moments, such as the Cambrian diversification event and predator-prey escalation in marine ecosystems, the rise and ecological expansion of jawed fishes from Devonian and Carboniferous deposits, and Quaternary extinctions of large North American mammals like giant ground sloths, influenced by ecosystem changes, human hunting, and glacial recession. He also advances global stratigraphic correlation to refine the geologic time scale.