MindTheGap: Quantifying the completeness of the stratigraphic record and its role in reconstructing the tempo and mode of evolution

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Welcome to the webpage of the project.

We develop numerical models to study the structure of the geological record and make better recontructions of past evolutionary dynamics. Our goal is to understand how time, environmental and evolutionary events are represented in imperfect, gappy records and to use this knowledge to reconstruct the history of life and palaeoclimate.

This project is a consortium between Utrecht University and the Netherlands eScience Center. Some software used and developed in this project is a continuation of AstroTOM. See also project record at CORDIS.

Project news

  • We welcome Dr Charlotte Summers as a Research Software Engineer on board of the CarboKitten.jl team.

  • Stratcols 1.0.0, an R package for handling stratigraphic columns and quantifying stratigraphic order, has been released on CRAN.

  • Niklas Hohmann and Emilia Jarochowska will teach a half-day workshop “Building models for stratigraphic palaeobiology in R” at the Palaeontological Association Annual Meeting in Portsmouth, December 2025. You can still register!

Funded by the European Union (ERC, MindTheGap, StG project no 101041077). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.