Mark Williams is a palaeontologist at the University of Leicester. He is a long-time member of the Anthropocene Working Group, having been involved from its inception. Over the past three decades he has been lucky enough to collect fossils on every continent, using this information to piece together small fragments of past worlds to help gain a better understanding of how life has evolved over hundreds of millions of years. Much of his work now focuses on the current state of life, and how its diversity is threatened by human activities in the Anthropocene. With his friend Jan Zalasiewicz, Williams has co-written several popular science books that examine the special place of the Earth in the cosmos, most recently The Cosmic Oasis (2022). He is also co-author, with Julia Thomas and Zalasiewicz, of The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary approach (2020).