Our research focuses on the connections between changes in environmental conditions through Earth history and changes in the composition and structure of organismal communities. Most projects focus on Cenozoic ecosystems over the last 65 million years and modern ecosystems with an emphasis on mammalian communities. Research in the Fox group is expressly interdisciplinary and relies on data, methods, and theory from stable isotope geochemistry, sedimentary geology, traditional paleontology, ecology, evolutionary biology, comparative anatomy, and biogeography. The primary tools we use to examine the connections between environmental and organismal change are the elemental and stable isotope geochemistry of various materials (sedimentary minerals and organic matter; teeth, bones, and other tissues of fossil and modern organisms), the biogeography of modern organisms, and quantitative analyses of the three dimensional morphology of the teeth, jaws, and skulls of fossil and modern vertebrates.