Mary Droser

Biosketch

Mary Droser is a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her research is in the area of evolutionary paleoecology, examining large-scale interactions between life and environments. She was born in New York, New York and graduated from the University of Rochester in Geology. She obtained her M.S. from SUNY Binghamton and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. She joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside in 1989. She was a recipient of the SEPM Moore Medal (2020), the University of California, Riverside Dissertation Advisor Award (2020), the Walcott Medal from National Academy of Sciences (2022) and the Paleontological Society Medal (2024). Recently, she has worked with the South Australian government to establish a new National Park based on the Ediacaran fossil record of South Australia.

Research Interests

Research in the Droser lab has largely focused on the early evolution of animal life. To understand the development of the infaunal habitat in the early Paleozoic, Droser developed ichnofabric indices to semi-quantitatively evaluate amount of bioturbation. Droser, along with colleagues and students utilized the extensive fossil record of the Cambrian and Ordovician rocks of the western US to examine the environmental context of the Cambrian and Ordovician radiations. Much of her work in the last 20 years has focused on the Ediacaran of South Australia where her team has excavated over 40 fossiliferous beds that reveal in situ communities of the Ediacara Biota. Using this extraordinary fossil record, they have described a significant number of new taxa with wildly varying body plans. With students, Droser has documented the earliest sexual reproduction in animals, the advent of motility, the oldest evidence of scavenging and the advent of multicellular life in the water column.