Our research activities focus on understanding the toxic effect of metal pollution during extinction events and other biogeochemical events through geological time. Such metals are either re-mobilized during periods of marine anoxia and/or transported into the oceanic basins by brines. The specific focus of the research is on using fossil morphologies (teratologies, histology, …) to ground truth ancient geochemical signatures, in order to identify them as contemporaneous parameters in the cause-and-effect scenarios that link ocean and paleo-climate evolution with step-changes and bottlenecks in the development of the biosphere.