Dr. Allmon in the field in New Zealand.

My major research interest is the ecology of the origin and maintenance of biological diversity and the application of the geological record to the study of these problems. I am particularly interested in the systematics, ecology, and evolution of Cenozoic mollusks, especially the marine snail family Turritellidae, their patterns of origination and extinction over the last 100 million years, and the environmental and ecological contexts of these patterns. Most recently, I have been working on the paleoenvironmental context of evolutionary change in gastropod lineages across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary in the U.S. Gulf Coastal Plain, and on connections between speciation, abundance and primary productivity, and how these can be studied in the fossil record.