I’m a Ph.D. student at Columbia Unversity and a Graduate Student Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History.

• At Columbia, I’m in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
• At the AMNH, I’m a partner student of the Richard Gilder Graduate School and I’m based in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology.

I study the fossil record to understand climate change in the past and present and I model past climate using morphology and ecology. I also study the effects of long-term climate change on the evolution of body shape and size in horses, antelopes, camels, and other large herbivores.

You can find my research on ORCID & Google Scholar.

Keywords: paleobiology, macroevolution, ecomorphology, paleoclimate, paleoecology.

Publications

• Janis, C. M., Richardson, W., Morales-Garcia, N. M., & Baird, C. N. (2024). A horse walks into a bar: an explanation for the long face. Annales Zoologici Fennici, 61, 503–529. doi:10.5735/086.061.0130.

• Baird, C. N., Ernst, M., Waurick, I., Blom, M. P. K., & Bibi, F. (2024). Integrative taxonomy using historical specimens provides evidence for a single species of bushbuck, Tragelaphus scriptus (Mammalia: Bovidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 200(2), 532–546. doi:10.1093/zoolinnean/zlad096.

• Janis, C. M., Franklin, E., Baird, C. N., & Tyler, J. (2023). The Miocene browsing horses: Another way to be a successful large equid. In H. H. T. Prins & I. J. Gordon (Eds.), The Equids (pp. 47–71). Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-031-27144-1_3.