PALEONTOLOGY SYMPOSIUM 2026
Saturday, July 11th9:00am — 3:00pm
Lunch Included
|
|
Hear presentations from world-class paleontologists working in the Big Horn Basin.
MEET THE PRESENTERS
|
Myron Cook grew up in the Bighorn Basin where he developed a love of the outdoors and geology. He pursued his geologic interest by getting a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of Wyoming in 1987 and then received his master’s degree from Northern Arizona in 1989. He then worked in the petroleum industry for 33 years as an exploration geologist. He explored worldwide for hydrocarbons and lived in various places such as Argentina, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. Upon retiring, he decided he wanted to share geology with the public and created his YouTube channel in late 2021. Many of his videos focus on his beloved Wyoming. He quickly became one of the most popular geologists on YouTube and currently has over 30 million views.
|
|
Dr. Erik Kvale is a retired Principal Geologist formerly with Devon Energy Corporation of Oklahoma City. Kvale received his Ph.D. in Geology from Iowa State University in 1986. He has maintained an active research interest in the Bighorn Basin of northern Wyoming and has published a number of papers on his work there including the discovery, naming, and mapping of the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite near Shell, Wyoming. Currently he is the President of the Board for the Big Horn Basin Dinosaur and Geoscience Museum.
|
|
|
Jessica Lippincott is a Wyoming-based paleontologist, author, and science communicator with over 30 years of field experience. She is one of the founding paleontologists of the Wyoming Dinosaurium Project, and was previously Executive Director of the Big Horn Basin Foundation and Education Director of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center. She is also on the board for the Wild West Dino Den based out of Greybull, Wyoming. Additionally, she is an Executive Producer for the documentary WHY DINOSAURS?
|
|
Dr. Dave Lovelace is a vertebrate paleontologist specializing in Triassic-aged rocks of the Rocky Mountain West. He joined the University of Wisconsin, Madison geology team as a research scientist after completing his PhD at UW-Madison’s Department of Geoscience in 2012. Broadly speaking, his research combines the study of ancient bones, trackways, and soils to build a picture of what ecosystems looked like 230 million years ago—when the first mammals, turtles, crocodiles, lizards, and dinosaurs evolved. Since joining the museum team, he and his students have made several exciting discoveries including the oldest known turtle tracks in the world, two mass-death-assemblages of Late Triassic amphibians, the oldest dinosaur tracks in Wyoming, and several new Late Triassic taxa named with assistance from the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes on whose land they were found.
|
|
|
Dr. Paul E. Morse is a paleoanthropologist specializing in primate evolution. Morse earned Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 2018. He is an Assistant Professor teaching human histology and conducts research actively in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming on the adaptive dietary context during primate evolution, particularly through comparative dental morphology. His work involves analyzing fossil primate teeth using microcomputed tomography scans to explore hypotheses about primate origins and evolution.
|
|
Dr. Ethan Parrish is by training a geologist who specialized during his PhD in reading the sedimentary record in order to assess how climate change affected a terrestrial hydrologic system fifty-five million years ago. While pursuing his PhD, he worked as a camera operator for multiple films and documentaries driving him to become a filmmaker. His passion lies at the intersection of Earth science and humanity, with a desire to tell the stories that illustrate the beauty and importance of that relationship. He was approached by Dr. Dave Lovelace while working on his PhD and they collaborated to document the process by which Lovelace, Fort Washakie School, Shoshone, and Arapaho tribal leaders named three new taxa found on the Wind River Indian Reservation.
|
|
|
Dr. Thierry Smith is a senior researcher in vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS). Smith earned his master’s in Zoology and Ph.D. in Geology and Mineralogy from UCLouvain in 1999. He teaches Paleontology at RBINS, has gone on expeditions in India, China, Romania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and currently conducts research on the origin, evolution, paleobiodiversity, and paleobiogeography of early modern vertebrates. He specializes in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum as seen in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming.
|
|
Rachel Stevens-Starks is a Graduate student at the University of Wyoming. Born and raised in Wyoming, she developed her interest in paleontology through volunteering and internships during the summer at the Tate Geological Museum. She has been with the Tate Geological Museum for over five years now, where she plans to continue to volunteer and learn as much as she can. Her research interests focus on hadrosaur dinosaurs in Wyoming, with an emphasis on addressing gaps in the state’s fossil records. She wants to continue to investigate understudied geological formations that may preserve missing or underrepresented dinosaur fauna. She has begun field research and has already started finding promising results.
|
|
