Michael Benton is an internationally renowned paleontologist, an authority on the evolution of vertebrates, the origin and radiation of the dinosaurs, biodiversity through time (including mass extinctions), the nature and quality of the fossil record, and dating the tree of life. He is a prolific author, with more than 700 scientific papers. He has also published several textbooks as well as more than 50 books on dinosaurs and related topics, some for adults, the majority targeted at younger readers.
Mike joined the University of Bristol in 1989 from Queen’s University Belfast, and since then Bristol has hosted what has become one of the leading paleobiology groups, both in the UK and internationally, in no small way due to Mike’s influence. He pioneered the application of paleontological data to macroevolutionary questions. His 1993 compilation of stratigraphic ranges of fossil taxa, The Fossil Record 2, with 90 contributors, was a forerunner of the Paleobiology Database and provided the basis for his early exploration of patterns of diversification and extinction. He analyzed the congruence between the stratigraphic order in which taxa appear and their sequence in phylogenies, independent measures of the history of clades, showing that the fossil record provides good documentation of the history of life through the Phanerozoic. He promoted the use of fossils to supply ‘error bars’ on key phylogenetic divergences, a major step in enhancing the utility of molecular clocks.
Mike was an early proponent of the application of cladistics in vertebrate paleontology and the first to analyze the relationships of basal diapsid reptiles and basal archosaurs. His research on the role of competition between dinosaurs and other archosaurs showed that the outcome was a product of contingency rather than competitive success. He recognized the potential for reconstructing dinosaur color based on the analysis of melanosomes in feathers.
Mike made major contributions regarding the end-Permian extinction, leading to his book When Life Nearly Died (2003), published as a revised version in paperback in 2015. His research on Permo–Triassic sequences in Russia documented ecosystem change following the extinction: top carnivores, for example, took more than 15 Myr to become re-established. He also investigated the earlier Permian Olsen’s Extinction as well as the collapse of the Carboniferous rainforests. His more recent book Extinctions: How Life Survives, Adapts and Evolves (2023) reflects this major aspect of his scientific interests, including how mass extinctions can trigger diversifications.
Mike’s research on the Triassic recovery following the end-Permian mass extinction led to the recognition of a Triassic Revolution, represented by increasingly energetic life on land coincident with the origins of endothermy in the lineages leading to birds and mammals. He championed the view that this coincides with an earlier start of the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. He showed that modern continental ecosystems originated during the Late Cretaceous, and their evolution was driven by the rise of angiosperms in what he termed the Angiosperm Terrestrial Revolution, superseding what he originally named the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution.
Mike continues to display an uncanny ability to identify new questions and ways to address them, and it is no surprise that he contributed last year to a review on artificial intelligence in paleontology. At the same time, he is deeply interested in the history of paleontology, with a focus on dinosaurs, and in the role and ethics of museums.
Apart from his scientific contributions, Mike is a leader in educating the new generation of paleontologists. His textbooks are widely used. Vertebrate Paleontology, published in 1990, is in its fifth edition and is translated into multiple languages. His two books with David Harper, Basic Palaeontology (1997) and Introduction to Paleobiology and the Fossil Record (2009, second edition 2020), cover the entire field. He also edited and contributed to an updated sixth edition of Richard Cowen’s History of Life (2020), which was a team effort with his colleagues at Bristol. Mike established the M.Sc. course in paleobiology at the University of Bristol in 1996, and more than 500 students have graduated from it so far, and he has advised more than 80 doctoral students and 25 postdocs, many of them international, who now occupy posts around the world.
Mike has advised on multiple television programs, including the BBC’s groundbreaking Walking with Dinosaurs. His contributions have been recognized with the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London, the T. Neville George Medal of the Geological Society of Glasgow, the Jean Baptiste Lamarck Medal of the European Geosciences Union, the Lapworth Medal of the Palaeontological Association, and the Romer-Simpson Medal of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2021 for services to paleontology and community engagement.
It is an honor to present Michael Benton as the 2025 Paleontological Society Medalist.
