Vertebrate Paleontology: The View from San Diego

Featured Speaker: Ashley Poust, PhD

The story of evolution is long and spread across the globe, but the view can be clarified by focusing on one region’s history. From the success of ancient saber-tooth predators to the ancestors of today’s off-shore giants, the whales, fossils from Southern California are helping to fill in that history and even rewrite sections of it. This lecture will take a regional approach to the history of life, using recent discoveries and ongoing research to explore how some of today’s ecosystems came to be.
 

Presenter Biography

Presenter: Ashley Poust received his PhD in Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. He is the James R. Colclough Postdoctoral Fellow at the Natural History Museum in San Diego. As a paleontologist he examines ancient life through anatomy, bone and egg microstructure, and biogeography. His work has been featured in Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, NPR, and many media outlets. He does field work in Montana and the U.S. Channel Islands studying the evolution of vertebrate life before and after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
 

Coordinator: Candace Gietzen