Summer can be a quiet time on campus, but that doesn’t mean much for members of our lab. Both graduate and undergraduate students are hard at work traveling and doing fieldwork.

PhD student Kellum, traveled to the Sternberg Natural History Museum in Hays, Kansas, where she was an assistant instructor for a high school paleontology camp and the instructor of record for a middle school paleontology camp. Following this trip, she traveled to the Smithsonian in D.C., where she spent a week measuring, photographing, and describing the skeletons of modern phocine seals.

Sounds like a science packed summer!

We had a great field season this summer out in the Oregon high desert. We ended up collecting fossils from three different localities spanning from the Oligocene into the Miocene. We found lots of interesting fossils such as small dogs, Hypertragulus, and Oredonts. Past lab members and new lab members came out to join us providing much needed support and allowing us to cover more ground.

Students learned how to accurately take notes and make plaster jackets in both hard and soft substrate. We even experienced rain and thunderstorms in the desert giving everyone a much needed shower! It was lots of fun and we are already dreaming up plans for next year. Thanks to everyone who came!

Win McLaughlin successfully defended her dissertation on the biotic and landscape evolution of Kyrgyztan, which is one of the most tectonically active areas in the world! She is now off to Oberlin College where she shall be teaching for the next year.

Good Luck Win!