Curator/Professor, Dept. of Integrative Biology

Research Description

I am broadly interested in how life has evolved on Earth, and in understanding the processes responsible for shaping life’s long-term evolution.  My primary sources of data are from the fossil and geological records, as well as historical information derived from the living biota (including their genomes).  My research has a strong epistemological component, often involving the development of new tools or ways of integrating disparate data, and as such I am interested in a broad range of problems. Graduate students are encouraged to develop their own research projects, and to advantage of intellectual breadth and depth of UCMP, the Department of Integrative, the other Berkeley Natural History Museums, and the greater Berkeley campus.

Other interests:

Charles enjoys teaching students at all levels, soccer, chess, and diving, especially with his family in Indonesia.  His favorite taxa include echinoderms and sarcopterygians (especially lungfish).

More publications can be accessed here and here.

Selected Publications

• Brunk, C.F., and C.R. Marshall. 2021. ‘ Whole organism ’, systems biology , and top-down criteria for evaluating scenarios for the origin of life. Life 11:690–715.

• Zimmt, J.B., S.M. Holland, S. Finnegan, and C.R. Marshall. 2021.  Recognizing pulses of extinction from clusters of last occurrences: Palaeontology, v. 64, p. 1-20, https://doi.org/10.1111/pala.12505. Read it

• Marshall, C.R., Latorre, D.V., Wilson, C.J., Frank, T.M., Magoulick, K.M., Zimmt, J.B. and Poust, A.W.  2021. Absolute abundance and preservation rate of Tyrannosaurus rex. Science, 372: 284-287.

• Marshall, C.R.  2019.  Using the Fossil Record to Evaluate Timetree Timescales.  Frontiers in Genetics, 10, p.1049.

• Lim, J.Y., C.R. Marshall, E.A. Zimmer, and W.L. Wagner.  2019.  Multiple colonizations of the Pacific by Peperomia (Piperaceae): Complex patterns of long‐distance dispersal and parallel radiations on the Hawaiian Islands.  Journal of Biogeography.  12 pages.  DOI: 10.1111/jbi.13717