Palaeontology, evolution, systematics, biogeography

Associate Professor Sue Hand is a vertebrate palaeontologist researching the history of Australian mammals, continuing climate and environmental change in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, implications of that change for forest and island faunas, Australia’s first fossil-rich amber, and the biodiversity, global relationships and evolutionary ecology of bats.

Her research interests are largely in the area of palaeontology, phylogenetics and biogeography, and specifically taxonomy, systematics, morphometrics, phylogenetics, biocorrelation, biogeography, palaeogeography, evolutionary biology and palaeoecology.

In these research areas, she has supervised/co-supervised 40 Honours, 3 Masters and 23 PhD students.

Her area of special interest is fossil and modern bats, a major component of Australasia's living and fossil faunas, representing a quarter of Australian mammal species. She is the author of all of Australia's fossil bat species (40 identified and 25 named taxa in 15 new genera from Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene deposits in Qld, NSW, NT, Vic and SA), and is describing other new bat species from digs in Europe, Asia, New Zealand and Oceania.