Jan Zalasiewicz
Jan Zalasiewicz is Emeritus Professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester, having started his career at the British Geological Survey. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, and chairs the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, particular fields of study include fossils (particularly graptolites) and mudrocks of Early Palaeozoic age, and Quaternary deposits, including the Anthropocene. He is a co-editor of three compilations on the Anthropocene: The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time? (Royal Society, 2011); A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene (Geological Society of London, 2014) and The Anthropocene as a geological time unit: a guide to the scientific evidence and current debate (Cambridge University Press, 2019). For a wider public, he is the author of The Earth After Us (Oxford University Press 2008), The Planet in a Pebble (OUP, 2010), Rocks: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2016) and Geology: A Very Short Introduction* (OUP, 2018); and, together with Mark Williams he has written The Goldilocks Planet: An Earth History of Climate Change (OUP, 2012), Ocean Worlds: the story of seas on Earth and other planets (OUP, 2014) and Skeletons: A frame for life(OUP, 2018). He also led the first English translation of Buffon’s 1778 Les Époques de la Nature, arguably the first science-based Earth history ever written (The Epochs of Nature, Chicago University Press, 2018).