Awards

A new finding led by previous NAS award recipient Shuhai Xiao suggests that the earliest sponges lacked mineral skeletons, which may explain why older fossils have remained elusive.

Xiao recieved the 2021 NAS Award in the Evolution of Earth and Life – Mary Clark Thompson Medal. Xiao is a renowned paleobiologist and geobiologist who studies the interactions between the biosphere and its environments at critical transitions in Earth history, particularly during the Ediacaran-Cambrian transition.

Xiao integrates geological, geochemical, and paleontological research on the evolution and radiation of eukaryotes, of algae, and of animals in the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods. Through this approach, his contributions at the interface of geology and paleontology have re-envisioned our understanding of the evolutionary transformation from the mainly microbial world of the Proterozoic to the diverse multicellular life of the Ediacaran and Cambrian periods.