Fieldwork

Each summer professor Claessens, several Holy Cross students, and their collaborators depart for Utah and other far corners of the world to search for the fossil remains of Mesozoic vertebrates, especially dinosaurs.

We collaborate with the staff of the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (Dr. Scott Sampson, the curator of vertebrate paleontology, Mr. Michael Getty, the collections manager, Mark Loewen, and their experienced crew of staff, graduate students and volunteers) in the exploration of the rich dinosaur deposits of the Late Cretaceous Kaiparowits Formation in southern Utah. As part of our participation in this project, we are currently studying the first known diagnostic forelimb skeleton of an ornithomimid dinosaur from the Kaiparowits Formation, which we have scanned, together with type material of related taxa, at our 3-D scanning facility.

A ceratopsian dinosaur quarry on top of a butte in Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, Utah, with Mark Loewen's trusted FJ cruiser in the foreground

In the summer of 2007, we will also be mounting an expedition to the Triassic rock layers of southern Utah, in search of vertebrate fossils from this important geological time period, that witnessed the origination of most modern vertebrate clades. The 2007 expedition to the Triassic is undertaken in collaboration with the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, where professor Claessens holds an affiliate curatorial position at the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology. Our Triassic fossil discoveries will ultimately be accessioned into the Peabody Museum collections.

Links to pages on our 3-D scanning facility, cineradiographic research, and fieldwork, are located at the bottom of this page (and in the navigation bar).