Andre Coffa

PhD Candidate

Project Title
The Upper Tatarian Sediments of the Pre-Uralian Russian Platform - Sedimentology and Palaeobiology of the Kotelnich Red Bed Sequence

Supervisor/s
Prof. Pat Vickers-Rich

Research

Anton Chekhov referred to the vastness of the Russian landscape in his writing. Such vastness has been observed in the research carried out by Andre Coffa in his analysis of the Permian sequences preserved on the Russian Platform, good reason for Murchison designating this as the type section for this geological period. Coffa's project involves careful sedimentolgical mapping of a sequence along the Vyatka River near the town of Kotelnich on the Central Russian Platform. Preserved in this sequence are numerous skeletons of mammal-like reptiles, therapsids, that occur at many different stratigraphic levels. The main aim of the project has been to understand the mode of entrapment, preservation and the evolution of the fauna in those sediments - with special attention given to plotting changes in biodiversity related to changing environment and climate