Contact
Florida Museum of Natural History
Dickinson Hall, Rm. 222
1659 Museum Road
Gainesville, Florida 32611-7800
352-273-1938
jbloch@flmnh.ufl.edu
X: @BlochLab
Collections & Programs
Other Affiliations
UF Professor of Geological Sciences, Anthropology, and Zoology.
Education
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Research Interests
I study fossil mammals in order to address questions surrounding the first appearance and early evolution of the modern orders of mammals. A major emphasis is the interval from the terminal Cretaceous through the early Eocene, which includes the evolution and diversification of “archaic” mammals following the extinction of the dinosaurs (ca. 65 mya), and the first appearance of nearly one-half of the modern orders of mammals, several appearing coincident with rapid, large-scale, global warming at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary (ca. 55 mya). Specific research topics include: (1) the response of mammal communities to climate change; (2) use of phylogenetic methods to infer hypotheses of relationships; and (3) use of functional morphology in order to study the evolution and paleoecology of small mammals. I am currently doing related field-based research in the Paleocene and Eocene of the Clarks Fork, Bighorn, and Crazy Mountains basins of Wyoming and Montana, and the Cerrejon and Bogota formations of northern Colombia.
Publications
Research News
Maria Vallejo receives Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Academic Women
María Vallejo-Pareja, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, has won an Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for…
Frogs were Florida’s first-known vertebrates from the Caribbean
Deep in the forests of Haiti lives the blue-eyed La Hotte glanded frog (Eleutherodactylus glandulifer), which once went 20 years…
Paleontologists discover elephant graveyard in North Florida
About five and a half million years ago, several gomphotheres — extinct relatives of elephants — died in or near…
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Photo by Kristen Grace/Florida Museum. Please contact our research news desk for media inquiries.