Ed Landing (born 10 August 1949 in Milwaukee) is an American geologist and paleontologist.
As an undergraduate, Landing studied at the University of Wisconsin, where he gained his BSc, later attending graduate school at the University of Michigan, earning his MSc and PhD.
[citation needed] His field work in America and Canada (as well as in Mexico, Argentina, England, Wales, Germany, Morocco, Israel, Jordan, Siberia, south China) led to over 250 publications and 11 books that focus on the origin and precise uranium–lead dating (U-Pb) geochronology of the oldest metazoans, the biostratigraphy of the Early Paleozoic, recognition of ancient climate cycles and the proposal that high sea levels lead to heightened global warming (hyperwarming)(1,2) and reconstruction of Avalonia as a separate, unified continent by the terminal Ediacaran.
He was a co-proposer of the Ediacaran-Cambrian global stratotype at Fortune Head, eastern Newfoundland, the lowest divisions of the Cambrian Period (the Terreneuvian Epoch and Fortunian Age), and recovered Earth's oldest bryozoan from rock sections in Oaxaca State, southern Mexico.
[citation needed] In June 2010, an article in the magazine Geology for which Landing was the lead author was noted for providing the first definitive proof that "all major animal groups with internal and external skeletons appeared in the Cambrian geological period (543–489 million years ago).