Departmental homepageProfessor Conway Morris graduated from Bristol University in 1972 and completed his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1976. He held a Research Fellowship at St John's until moving to a lectureship at The Open University in 1979. He returned to Cambridge in 1987, rejoining the Fellowship at St John's, and was appointed Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences in 1995. He gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1996 on the subject of The History in our Bones. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990. He is noted for his study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale and the Cambrian explosion.
Prior to retirement, Professor Conway Morris taught extensively, especially for Part IA Earth Sciences and leading field trips.
His research interests focus on palaeobiology, evolutionary convergence, Cambrian explosion, SETI, mass extinctions, human uniqueness and science and religion.
The crucible of creation. The Burgess Shale and the rise of animals. xxiii+242pp, Oxford University Press (1998)
Life’s solution: inevitable humans in a lonely universe. xxi+464pp, Cambridge University Press (2003)
Conway Morris, S. The runes of evolution: How the universe became self-aware. Templeton Press (2015)
From extraterrestrials to animal minds: Six myths of evolution. Templeton Press/Rutgers University Press (2022)
