The original post: /r/askscience by /u/VertPaleoAMA on 2024-11-01 11:01:23.
Hi /r/AskScience! We are members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, here for our 11th annual AMA. We study fossil fish, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles — anything with a backbone! Our research includes how these organisms lived, how they were affected by environmental change like a changing climate, how they're related, and much more. You can follow us on X u/SVP_vertpaleo.
Joining us today are:
Clint Boyd, Ph.D. (/u/PalaeoBoyd) is the Curator of the North Dakota State Fossil Collection and the Paleontology Program Manager for the North Dakota Geological Survey. His research focuses on the evolutionary history of ornithischian dinosaurs and studying Eocene and Oligocene faunae from the Great Plains region of North America. Find him on X @boydpaleo.
Stephanie Drumheller, Ph.D. (/u/UglyFossils) is a paleontologist at the University of Tennessee whose research focuses on the processes of fossilization, evolution, and biology, of crocodiles and their relatives, including identifying bite marks on fossils. Find her on X @UglyFossils.
Anne Fogelsong (/u/vertpaleoama) is a fine arts major at Idaho State University and is researching how cultural depictions of extinct creatures influence the scientific interpretation of these same creatures. She is the lead author on a poster at SVP analyzing how Jurassic Park has influenced how skeletons of Tyrannosaurus have been mounted since the 1990s.
Robert Gay (/u/paleorob) is the Education Manager for the Idaho Museum of Natural History. He focuses on Late Triassic ecosystems in the American Southwest, specifically in and around Bears Ears National Monument. He also works on Idaho's Cretaceous vertebrates and the Idaho Virtualization Laboratory doing 3D scanning and printing. Combining the last two, we recently completed a new mount and reconstruction of Idaho's state dinosaur Oryctodromeus!
Ashley Hall (/u/vertpaleoama) is the Outreach Program Manager at Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, MT, USA, and a vertebrate paleontologist (dinosaurs, including birds) who specializes in informal education in museums, virtual programming, and science communication. She is also the author of Fossils for Kids: a Junior Scientist’s Guide to Dinosaur Bones, Ancient Animals, and Prehistoric Life on Earth.
Mindy Householder (/u/mindles1308) is a fossil preparator with the State Historical Society of North Dakota, USA. She has cleaned and repaired many fossil specimens for public museums and institutions over the past 18 years. Some well known specimens she worked on include “Jane” the juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex and “Dakota” the Edmontosaurus sp. fossilized natural mummy.
Rachel Laker, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her research is focused on understanding how taphonomic processes (like decay, burial, diagenesis) record a fossil's depositional history, and how taphonomy can be used to improve our understanding of the accumulation histories of assemblages.
Hannah Maddox (u/Hannahdactylus) is a Master's student from the University of Tennessee studying taphonomy and vertebrate paleontology. She is interested in how reptiles decay and comparing it to mammals, because we have historically used mammals as models assuming that mammalian decomposition and reptilian decomposition are similar enough to make 1-to-1 comparisons in the fossil record. Spoiler alert: Not so!
Melissa Macias, M.S. (/u/paleomel) is a senior paleontologist, project manager, and GIS analyst for a mitigation company, protecting fossils found on construction sites. She also studies giant ground sloth biogeography of North America, using GIS to determine potential geographic ranges.
Benjamin Matzen, M.A. (u/vertpaleoama) is a science educator at Oxbridge Academy, in West Palm Beach, Florida. He earned his Masters Degree from the University of California, Berkeley where his research focused on the Permian reptiles, pareiasaurs. He worked for years as a mitigation paleontologist before returning full time to the classroom. He has taught in California and Florida and his courses taught range from AP Biology and Anatomy to Earth Science and Chemistry. He continues to focus on science education and has recently begun working during the summer months with the Sternberg Museum of Natural History Paleontology Camps.
Jennifer Nestler, M.S. (/u/jnestler) is an ecologist who uses quantitative methods to tackle paleontological and biological questions and inform conservation decisions. She studies the morphology and ecology of fossil and modern crocodylians, and has also looked at bite marks, biases in field collection methods, and landscape-level modeling.
Melissa Pardi, Ph.D. (/u/MegafaunaMamMel) is a paleontologist and the Curator of Geology at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, IL, USA. Her research focus is the paleoecology of Quaternary mammals, including their diets and geographic distributions.
Adam Pritchard, Ph.D. (/u/vertpaleoama) is the Assistant Curator of Paleontology at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, VA, USA. His research focuses on the evolution of reptiles during the Permian and Triassic periods, a time of great change that saw the rise of the dinosaurs. Please check out the Virginia Museum of Natural History at vmnh.net. Dr. Pritchard has also co-produced the paleontology podcast series Past Time, available at www.pasttime.org.
Emily Simpson, Ph.D (/u/vertpaleoama) is a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, USA. Her research focuses broadly on how mammal communities respond to rapid environmental change, most recently with a focus on using stable isotopes to study herbivores at the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary in Egypt.
Rissa Westerfield, M.S. is a paleontologist who teaches 6-12 life and earth sciences at The Clariden School in Southlake, TX, USA, where she also serves as the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme Coordinator. She specializes in teaching high school paleontology with a strong focus on developing students' critical thinking skills, ethical understanding in science, and research.
We will be back starting around 11 AM Central Time (4 PM UTC) to answer your questions. See you soon!