Dr Luke Parry

Luke Parry graduated from St Anne’s College, University of Oxford with a Master’s degree in Earth Sciences in 2013. From there, here completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in 2017, which concerned the early evolutionary history of annelid worms and molluscs.

Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada and was a Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies postdoctoral fellow at Yale University from 2018-2019. Luke joined St Edmund Hall as an early career research fellow in January 2020.

Luke’s research aims to understand a major event in the history of life referred to as the ‘Cambrian Explosion’, a geologically brief interval during which all of the major groups of animals first appear in the fossil record. This research primarily focuses on investigations of exceptionally preserved fossils from approximately 500 million years ago that retain delicate tissues, such as guts, muscles and nervous systems. This fossil data is combined with phylogenies (evolutionary trees) to understand how the body plans of major groups of animals were assembled and how they have changed over time.

Parry, L. and Caron, J.B., 2019. Canadia spinosa and the early evolution of the annelid nervous system. Science advances, 5(9), p.eaax5858.

Vinther, J., Parry, L., Briggs, D.E. and Van Roy, P., 2017. Ancestral morphology of crown-group molluscs revealed by a new Ordovician stem aculiferan. Nature, 542(7642), pp.471-474.

Parry, L.A., Boggiani, P.C., Condon, D.J., Garwood, R.J., Leme, J.D.M., McIlroy, D., Brasier, M.D., Trindade, R., Campanha, G.A., Pacheco, M.L. and Diniz, C.Q., 2017. Ichnological evidence for meiofaunal bilaterians from the terminal Ediacaran and earliest Cambrian of Brazil. Nature ecology & evolution, 1(10), p.1455.