Specific responsibility: The Natural Sciences department, its staff, collections and projects.

Research interests/expertise: Early Mesozoic terrestrial and marine ecosystems; phylogeny and systematics of Rhynchocephalia and tanystropheids; global faunal and floral change across the Triassic-Jurassic boundary.

As an undergraduate at the University of Aberdeen, Dr Fraser studied zoology. He then moved to the university’s geology department for his doctoral research, studying the so-called Mesozoic fissure infills of the Bristol Channel area, focusing in particular on the lizard-like rhynchocephalians. Between 1985 and 1990 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge before moving to the States where he worked for 18 years at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. He returned to Scotland and National Museums Scotland in 2007. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geosciences, Virginia Tech and Honorary Fellow in Geosciences, Edinburgh University.

Dr Fraser’s research is interdisciplinary and centres on the Triassic period (250-201 million years ago). Collaborating with a number of colleagues worldwide, he has published widely on Triassic faunas and floras, both terrestrial and marine. During his time in Virginia, Dr Fraser worked extensively at the so-called Solite Quarry – a locality quarry straddling the Virginia - North Carolina State line and which is best known for its abundant exquisitely preserved insects.

The Triassic is a critical period in earth’s history as it saw the origin of many of the major groups of modern animals, (including mammals, crocodiles, turtles and true flies) and is renowned as the time when the first dinosaurs walked the planet. At the same time the Triassic world was home to some of the most bizarre vertebrate animals ever known – including the marine tanystropheids with some members having necks longer than their bodies and tail combined. Dr Fraser has published widely on this particular group of reptiles.

Over the past 20 years Dr Fraser has collaborated with colleagues at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, Peking University and the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago) investigating some of these strange marine reptiles from the Middle Triassic of southern China. One particularly remarkable form is Atopodentatus that sports a strange hammerhead-shaped snout, while an early turtle, Eorhynchochelys, possesses the very characteristic beak-shaped skull of turtles but lacks the typical bony carapace.

Dr Fraser has also been involved in an exciting Scottish-based research programme focusing on the Jurassic vertebrates of Skye. This is another major collaborative project with scientists from the universities of Edinburgh, Birmingham and Oxford. It highlights the richness of Scotland’s fossil record and is providing key insights into the world of the dinosaurs and the rich diversity of vertebrates that inhabited their world

Dr Fraser has recently returned to the subject area of his doctoral studies – the British fissure deposits. Much still remains to be discovered and understood about the rich vertebrate assemblages that were originally discovered over 100 years ago in cave sediments that were exposed in limestone quarries. Now collaborating with colleagues at the Natural History Museum, the National Museum of Northern Ireland and the University of Birmingham, Dr Fraser is re-investigating aspects of their age and depositional environment.