My first experience with paleontology came while I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. There I worked on North American fossils, participated in fieldwork in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, and started my own paleontological project in the United Arab Emirates. I went on to do a PhD on fossil bovids (antelopes) with Elisabeth Vrba at Yale University (2009), and since that time my collaborations in African projects have expanded to include work with several international paleontological teams in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. I have a had a long-term interest in the evolution of antelopes (Bovidae), as studied from both modern and fossil perspectives. The approaches I employ include comparative morphology, phylogenetics (morphology & molecules), geometric morphometrics, community structure, stable isotope analysis, and ancient DNA.

Between 2002 and 2011 I directed fieldwork in Late Miocene sediments of Abu Dhabi, resulting in the publication of a scientific monograph (Sands of Time, 2022). Since 2018 I lead an interdisciplinary team conducting yearly fieldwork in the Nile River Valley of Sudan, which since 2023 evolved into a 5-year ERC Consolidator Grant, PALEONILE.

I was an NSF international postdoc at the iPHEP (currently PALEVOPRIM) at the Université de Poitiers between 2009 and 2011, a Leibniz-DAAD fellow at the MfN in Berlin in 2012, and a Gerstner Scholar at the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2013. I’ve been a research scientist at the Museum für Naturkunde since late 2013, promoted to senior scientist (permanent) since 2018, and a privat dozent (external lecturer) at the Institute of Biology and Biochemistry of the University of Potsdam since 2020. Between 2022 and 2024 I was co-chair of the Department of Diversity Dynamics and head of the Evolutionary Morphology Section at the Museum für Naturkunde.

Check out my publications on my Google Scholar profile

Email: faysal.bibi(at)mfn.berlin / bibi(at)uni-potsdam.de