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Presidential Professor of Zoology
Curator of Vertebrate PaleontologyPhone: (405)325-4712
RM/Lab:SNOMNH
Fax: (405)325-6202
Current Research Interests and Subject Areas Available for Graduate Research
My research interests focus on the evolution, systematics, biogeography, and functional and comparative anatomy of fossil and recent mammals. To this end, I have become involved in biostratigraphic research and integration of biochronologic with geochronologic data in developing a temporal framework for mammalian evolution. My major current research and field project concerns the early evolution of higher mammals. To this end, I am collecting and preparing microvertebrate faunas from the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian to Campanian) of Utah, Wyoming, Montana, and Texas. These faunas span a time period for which such animals are virtually unknown worldwide, and their location greatly increases the known geographic distribution of Cretaceous microfaunas. They are of great interest because they include some of the most primitive marsupials and true placentals known, the latest occurrence of several archaic mammal groups, and the first exciting opportunity to document variation in vertebrate microfaunas for a very large span of time during the "Age of Dinosaurs." Recent discoveries include the oldest marsupial and the most primitive of all higher mammals. I am extending this field program to include dinosaur beds of Oklahoma. Another current (and also long term) project, also field oriented, is a study of the evolution of mid-Tertiary mammals on the South American continent. The introduction in the Oligocene of rodent and primate immigrants to an otherwise insular fauna provides an ideal "natural experiment" for many types of evolutionary studies. What are the factors, if there are causal factors, which effected the major changes in South American mid-Tertiary faunas? One issue I have been particularly keen on is the possibility that the small native ungulates were displaced by their ecological vicars, the caviomorph rodents, shortly after the latter appeared in South America (the recurrent theme of competition for food resources).
Curriculum Vitae
M.Phil., Columbia University
A.M., University of Chicago
A.B., Colby College
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