Curator/Professor Emeritus
Jim died on April 7, 2023 of natural causes. Read his obituary in Berkeley News.
His research: Jim studies the evolutionary origins of morphological novelties.
Burning questions: "How did the metazoan genome respond to selection so as to produce the great radiation in body types found, for example, during the Cambrian explosion? What were the selective features?"
Sidelights: He is also interested in the macroevolution of ecogeographic units (species' populations, communities, provinces, etc.), especially with regard to diversity problems in marine bivalves in the Cenozoic oceans. According to Jim, this involves "accumulating a database of the geographic and geologic ranges of all genera and subgenera, and all species in certain local cases through the last 65 million years …. Fortunately, I have hard-working colleagues, chiefly Dave Jablonski at U. Chicago and Kaustuv Roy at UCSD."
His favorite thing about science: "The opportunity to see things first."
Selected Publications
- Tomasovych, A., D. Jablonski, S. K. Berke, A. Z. Krug, and J. W. Valentine. 2015. Non-linear thermal gradients shape broad-scale patterns in geographic range size and can reverse Rapoport's Rule. Global Ecology and Biogeography 24: 157-167. DOI 10. 1111/geb. 12242
- Valentine, J. W., and C. R. Marshall. 2015. Fossil and transcriptomic perspectives on the origins and success of metazoan multicellularity. Pp. 31-46 in I. Ruiz-Trillo, and A. M. Nedelcu (eds.) The evolution of multicellularity. Advances in Marine Genomics 2, Springer, Dordrecht.
- Huang, S., K. Roy, J. W. Valentine, and D Jablonski. 2015. Convergence, divergence, and parallelism in marine biodiversity trends: Integrating present-day and fossil data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 112 (16): 4903-4908. DOI/10.1073/pnas. 1412219112
- Valentine, J.W., and D. Jablonski. 2015. A twofold role for global energy gradients in marine biodiversity trends. Journal of Biogeography 42 (6): 997-1005. DOI:10.1111/jbi. 12515
- Valentine, J.W. and D. Jablonski. 2010. Origins of marine patterns of biodiversity: some correlates and applications. Palaeontology, 2010: 1203-1210.