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Per Ahlberg obtained his Ph.D. in zoology from University of Cambridge in 1989. After five years as a Departmental Lecturer in the Zoology Department, University of Oxford, he joined the Palaeontology Department of the Natural History Museum, London, as a member of research staff in 1994. In 2003 he returned to his native Sweden to become Professor of Evolutionary Organismal Biology at Uppsala University.
Per’s main research area is the origin and early evolution of tetrapods (land vertebrates). He has discovered and/or identified six of the 11 known fossil tetrapods from the Devonian period (417-354 million years ago), including Elginerpeton pancheni, which is the earliest tetrapod known from the fossil record. Recent work includes determining the origin of the tetrapod internal nostril (choana) in the posterior external nostril of fishes. At present, working in collaboration with Georgy Köntges (UCL, London), he is integrating data from comparative morphology and palaeontology with transgenic permanent cell lineage labeling in mouse and Xenopus, in order to investigate the evolution of developmental patterning units in the vertebrate head, neck and middle ear. |
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