Here are some of the people I am working with, both at Duke and at other institutions. My undergraduate student lab assistants are currently sorting through the coarse and fine fractions generated by screenwashing fossil-bearing sediments from the San Juan Basin of New Mexico. They have been finding mammalian teeth and skeletal fragments, as well as crocodilian teeth and many pieces of Late Cretaceous fish and dinosaurs. They also keep the place lively! I don't usually take students out in the field who have not first worked in the lab and become familiar with the fossils we are looking for.

Much of my work depends on collaborations with great scientists and teachers at other institutions. Scroll down to see those people, what we are working on, and links to their pages.

Francesca Pignataro is a senior double-majoring in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy and in Comparative Area Studies. She is a University Scholar. Francesca is working on the San Juan Basin project and is currently working on her third field season (this time in France, however). She is also doing research on enamel microwear in multituberculate mammals across the K-T boundary.

More about Francesca's research here.

Jacques Colon is a senior in Biological Anthropology and Anatomy at Duke, and is working on the San Juan Basin project. His interests include dinosaurs and other Cretaceous fossils, but he hopes to go to medical school before being completely corrupted by paleontologists.

Jesse Swanko is a 2004 Duke graduate in Biology, and while at Duke he was deeply involved with Duke Hockey, as both the club president and as assistant captain. He worked on the San Juan Basin project, and is now looking for work in oceanography. He is particularly interested in the ecology of marine mammals, he has field experience on cruises in the Gulf of Alaska, and he has the organizational skills of a great project manager.

Nina Videau is a recent graduate of Durham's Riverside High School, and will be leaving Durham to attend Hollins University in Fall 2004. She worked in the lab and joined us on the San Juan Basin field crew in New Mexico for a month in 2003, where she learned to measure stratigraphic sections, collect vertebrate fossils, and collect samples for palynological analysis. This summer she decided to forgo the heat and stick to lab work.

Despite her love of Biology and her advanced paleontological experience, she thinks she's going to major in International Relations at Hollins. I guess that student exchange trip she took to Armenia must have been more influential than the one to New Mexico.

Dr. Tomida is Chief of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at Japan's National Science Museum, in Tokyo. We are describing some exceptional multituberculate fossils that belong to the National Science Museum.

Dr. Williamson is a Curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He researches dinosaurs as well as mammals, and is an expert on the fauna and stratigraphy of the San Juan Basin. He and the large group of volunteers that he has supervised and trained have found many important fossil localities in this area. Some, such as a large tyrannosaurid skull, have received much public attention. Others, such as microvertebrate site L-4005, are less "charismatic," but are very exciting, scientifically speaking.

Dr. Kirchner is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at U. C. Berkeley. In real life, he's a geomorphologist and hydrologist. But as it turns out, some of the analytical skills useful in those fields can be applied to paleobiological questions as well. We are working on applying signal-processing algorithms to paleontological time series, and have been successful in finding some general patterns of biotic recovery from extinction events.