Welcome!

My name is Michael D'Antonio, and I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. My research aims to reconstruct the biology and relationships of extinct plants in late Paleozoic (~300 million years ago) ecosystems through a combination of field work, museum specimen work, and insights from the biology of living plants. To do this I use advanced imaging techniques (X-ray CT and microCT, SEM, Airyscan confocal super-resolution microscopy, and white-light scanning) as well as traditional imaging techniques (optical microscopy and photography). My current projects include 3D reconstruction and systematics of enigmatic plants from the famous Mazon Creek deposit and the development and physiology of arborescent lycopsid vascular tissue.

I am also a geobiologist researching the effects of land plant evolution on the geological carbon cycle via weathering. The appearance of trees in the Paleozoic fundamentally altered terrestrial environments, climate, and the carbon cycle, and I study the effects that early land plant evolution had on the Earth system, particularly as they have carried through to more recent times in Earth's history.