Peter Wilf
Fossil plants tell the story of our green planet’s evolution and reveal its landscapes from deep time to present. They are also extremely sensitive indicators of past climates, plant-insect interactions, biodiversity, and the effects of significant environmental disturbances. These data provide deep-time analogs that uniquely illuminate modern ecosystems and their possible responses to anthropogenic change. My temporal focus is the latest Cretaceous through middle Eocene, ~67-45 million years ago (Ma), an interval characterized by global disturbances that are closely spaced in geologic time. These include latest Cretaceous warming and cooling (68-66 Ma), the end-Cretaceous mass extinction (66 Ma), ensuing recovery during the Paleocene (66-56 Ma), and both abrupt and long-term warming across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary (56 Ma). I enjoy collaborations with numerous colleagues worldwide and a terrific lab group, with whom I do extensive fieldwork, concentrated currently in Patagonia, Argentina, and increasingly in SE Asia. Here are highlights of two current projects, and more are listed here.
Origins of Southeast Asian Rainforests from Paleobotany and Machine Learning
This cutting-edge NSF project is underway in collaboration with Dr. Thomas Serre’s machine-learning lab at Brown, Dr. Maria Gandolfo’s paleobotany lab at Cornell, and numerous collaborators at MEF in Argentina and in several more countries including China, India, Australia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Brunei. We aim to develop the powerful tools of machine learning to identify fossil leaves and shed a powerful new light on the evolution of SE Asia’s extremely biodiverse and threatened rainforests. We are making and using extensive fossil collections from SE Asia and diverse areas that have contributed to the flora through plate movements over geologic time.
Patagonia Paleofloras Project
The fossil record of life on land predominantly comes from the Northern Hemisphere. However, the outstandingly rich, relatively little-known fossil beds of Patagonia, southern Argentina, provide an unrivaled opportunity to learn whether life responded differently to mass extinction, plate tectonics, and past climate change on the other side of the world. This multinational NSF project intensively samples and analyzes fossil plants and animals from Patagonia through about 20 million years, from just before the end-Cretaceous dinosaur extinction (66 million years ago), through the early recovery period and the Eocene warming interval. Through groundbreaking field discoveries, comprehensive collections, and state-of-the-art lab techniques, this research is transforming understanding of the origins of the Southern Hemisphere’s floras and biomes, the role of Patagonia, and the legacy of surviving living fossils now located in vulnerable rainforest areas as far away as Southeast Asia (see above). A Google Scholar page lists our >135 publications.
- Fellow, Paleontological Society 2017.
- Fellow, Geological Society of America 2016.
- Paul F. Robertson Research Breakthrough of the Year Award, Penn State College of Earth & Mineral Sciences 2016.
- George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, Pennsylvania State University 2013.
- Kavli Fellow, National Academy of Sciences and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2011.
- Distinguished Lecturer, The Paleontological Society 2009-2012.
- David and Lucile Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering 2005-2010
Dr. Peter Wilf is a paleobotanist investigating ancient ecosystems, past environmental change, biogeography, and the evolution, extinction, and paleoconservation of plants and terrestrial ecosystems. His research emphasizes questions relevant to modern climate change, biodiversity, and biogeography. Fieldwork locations over three decades include Argentina, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Chile, Brunei, Western USA, and Pennsylvania. Dr. Wilf’s recognitions include Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Paleontological Society, and the Geological Society of America; David and Lucile Packard Fellow; the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching from Penn State; and the Paul F. Robertson Breakthrough of the Year Award and the Wilson Award for Excellence in Research from the Penn State College of Earth & Mineral Sciences.
Summary of major research topic: Assembly and Paleoconservation of Southeast Asia’s Endangered Rainforests. The endangered, hyperdiverse tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia have assembled from multiple sources, reflecting the region's dynamic geology. Illuminating the little-known paleobotanical history of the region’s vegetation requires comprehensive sampling efforts at diverse, far-flung locations. Our two-decade project on Cretaceous–Eocene floras of Argentine Patagonia has revealed ranges in West Gondwana more than 50 million years ago for numerous iconic, high-biomass SE Asian trees, such as kauris, gums, and Asian chinkapins. In SE Asia itself, we recently discovered the first fossil-leaf floras from Brunei (northern Borneo), representing the first study of Cenozoic compression floras in the Malay Archipelago for more than 100 years. The fossils showed that the current dominant and imperiled regional trees, the giant dipterocarps, already dominated Borneo four million years ago. These discoveries inform conservation efforts and frame the high-risk biogeography of the remaining rainforests in Southeast Asia. In Australia, we recently demonstrated the direct use of fossil evidence to inform protection of living tropical rainforests.