About

Denn N. Reed is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on human evolution, micromammal paleoecology, taphonomy, GIS, and remote sensing. His work involves field studies in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Morocco, contributing to the understanding of paleoecological and evolutionary processes through interdisciplinary approaches.

Research topics

• Geology
• Geography
• Archaeology
• Ecology
• Biology
• Paleontology
• Remote sensing
• Cartography
• Earth science
• Physical geography
• Geochemistry

Selected publications

• Afar fossil shows broad distribution and versatility of Paranthropus

  Nature · 2026-01-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  The Afar depression in northeastern Ethiopia contains a rich palaeontological and archaeological record, which documents 6 million years of human evolution. Abundant faunal evidence links evolutionary patterns with palaeoenvironmental change as a principal underlying force1. Many of the earlier hominin taxa recognized today are found in the Afar, but Paranthropus has been conspicuously absent from the region. Here we report on the discovery, in the Mille-Logya research area, of a partial mandible that we attribute to Paranthropus, dated to between 2.5 and 2.9 million years ago and found in a well-understood chronological and faunal context. The find is among the oldest fossils attributable to Paranthropus and indicates that this genus, from its earliest known appearance, had a greater geographic distribution than previously documented2. Often seen as a dietary specialist feeding on tough food, the range of diverse habitats with which eastern African Paranthropus can now be associated shows that this suggested adaptive niche did not restrict its ability to disperse as widely as species of Australopithecus and early Homo. The discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar emphasizes how little is known about hominin evolution in eastern Africa during the crucial period between 3 and 2.5 million years ago, when this genus and the Homo lineage presumably emerged. With its attribution to Paranthropus, a 2.6-million-year-old partial mandible expands the range of the genus into the Afar region of Ethiopia and adds to our understanding of hominin evolution in eastern Africa.

  PublisherDOI
• RETRACTED

  RETRACTED: First Afar Paranthropus shows wider distribution and versatility of the genus

  Research Square · 2025-04-16

  preprint
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The hominin fossil record of the Omo-Turkana Basin

  Journal of Human Evolution · 2025-10-28

  articleOpen access

  The Omo-Turkana Basin is one of three major regions for the study of hominin evolution in Africa. It has yielded a rich hominin fossil record of 1231 specimens, around a third of the record for the whole of Africa for the period from the Messinian through the Calabrian. Here, we consider the fossil hominin record of the Omo-Turkana Basin as an object of study in its own right and show the contribution that an analysis of such an exhaustive record can make. The data come from 117 publications allowing the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date synthesis of this record. Our analysis provides a quantitative perspective on the biases affecting this record, such as skeletal element abundance representation, chronostratigraphic distribution, and difficulties in taxonomic assignment. It also provides historical perspective, illustrating the major contribution made by the Omo-Turkana hominin fossil record to our knowledge of human evolution. We provide a synthetic overview of the taxa represented and discuss the chronological distribution of taxonomic groups in the basin including the relative abundance of Paranthropus and Homo (2/3 and 1/3, respectively) during their long period of coexistence. Integrating the data makes it possible to address difficult questions that have been underinvestigated until now. For example, contrary to the prevailing view, the genus Homo is well represented in the Omo-Turkana Basin between 2.7 and 2 Ma. Additionally, we show that the hominin fossil record of the Upper Burgi and KBS Members is atypical, both in terms of skeletal element abundance and taxonomy. Neither paleoenvironments nor taphonomic or collecting biases can fully explain this anomaly.

  PublisherDOI

• Le registre d’hominines fossiles du bassin de l’Omo-Turkana

  Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d anthropologie de Paris · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Ce document a t gnr automatiquement le

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From fossils to mind

  Communications Biology · 2023-06-13 · 36 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Fossil endocasts record features of brains from the past: size, shape, vasculature, and gyrification. These data, alongside experimental and comparative evidence, are needed to resolve questions about brain energetics, cognitive specializations, and developmental plasticity. Through the application of interdisciplinary techniques to the fossil record, paleoneurology has been leading major innovations. Neuroimaging is shedding light on fossil brain organization and behaviors. Inferences about the development and physiology of the brains of extinct species can be experimentally investigated through brain organoids and transgenic models based on ancient DNA. Phylogenetic comparative methods integrate data across species and associate genotypes to phenotypes, and brains to behaviors. Meanwhile, fossil and archeological discoveries continuously contribute new knowledge. Through cooperation, the scientific community can accelerate knowledge acquisition. Sharing digitized museum collections improves the availability of rare fossils and artifacts. Comparative neuroanatomical data are available through online databases, along with tools for their measurement and analysis. In the context of these advances, the paleoneurological record provides ample opportunity for future research. Biomedical and ecological sciences can benefit from paleoneurology's approach to understanding the mind as well as its novel research pipelines that establish connections between neuroanatomy, genes and behavior.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hominin nomenclature and the importance of information systems for managing complexity in paleoanthropology

  Journal of Human Evolution · 2023-01-15 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Moving away from “the Muddle in the Middle” toward solving the Chibanian puzzle

  Evolutionary Anthropology Issues News and Reviews · 2023-11-09 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Not applicable. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Deciphering Alterations of Rodent Bones through In Vitro Digestion: An Avenue to Understand Pre-Diagenetic Agents?

  Minerals · 2023-01-14 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Recent taphonomic studies have shown that avian predators such as owls are responsible for most small-mammal fossil accumulations, and that predators cause bone loss and breakage as well as modification to the surface of bones that are preserved. However, the specific physiochemical alterations and the alterations of bone microstructures that predators induce remain poorly understood. In order to better separate and characterize the effects of bone digestion by owls, we performed an experimental study to simulate digestion by a predator. We put fresh rodent long bones into various solutions to simulate the digestive effects of predators. We first tested an acid solution, followed by other solutions containing key enzymes such as trypsin, lipase, and trypsin + lipase. Next, we compared the results of the simulated digestion experiments with partly digested long bones recovered from Tyto alba and Bubo bubo pellets. We observed that acid action alone did not reproduce the modifications observed on bones from owl pellets, while the enzymatic activity (notably trypsin and trypsin + lipase) produced modifications most similar to those observed on the bones from the owl pellets. These results open a promising field of future experimentation to better understand the early diagenetic modification induced in small mammal bones by digestion, which can improve our ability to recognize the role of nocturnal predators in fossil accumulations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A solution to the challenges of interdisciplinary aggregation and use of specimen-level trait data

  iScience · 2022-09-13 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access

  Understanding variation of traits within and among species through time and across space is central to many questions in biology. Many resources assemble species-level trait data, but the data and metadata underlying those trait measurements are often not reported. Here, we introduce FuTRES (Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies; pronounced few-tress), an online datastore and community resource for individual-level trait reporting that utilizes a semantic framework. FuTRES already stores millions of trait measurements for paleobiological, zooarchaeological, and modern specimens, with a current focus on mammals. We compare dynamically derived extant mammal species' body size measurements in FuTRES with summary values from other compilations, highlighting potential issues with simply reporting a single mean estimate. We then show that individual-level data improve estimates of body mass—including uncertainty—for zooarchaeological specimens. FuTRES facilitates trait data integration and discoverability, accelerating new research agendas, especially scaling from intra- to interspecific trait variability. © 2022 The Authors

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fossil Vertebrates and Paleoenvironments of the Pliocene Hadar Formation at Dikika, Ethiopia

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-05-19 · 3 citations

  book-chapter

  International audience

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• PaleoCore: A model for Developing Distributed Data Frameworks in SBE and EHR

  NSF · $203k · 2012–2017

• Collaborative Research: Paleontological Field Research at Dikika, Ethiopia

  NSF · $25k · 2009–2010

Frequent coauthors

• Denis Geraads

  30 shared

• Zeresenay Alemseged

  University of Chicago

  24 shared

• René Bobe

  University of Oxford

  20 shared

• Jonathan G. Wynn

  U.S. National Science Foundation

  15 shared

• Terry Harrison

  8 shared

• Kristine L. Metzger

  United States Fish and Wildlife Service

  7 shared

• Amandus Kwekason

  6 shared

• W. Andrew Barr

  George Washington University

  6 shared

Education

• PhD, IDPAS

  Stony Brook University

  2003