Monthly Meetings

October Speaker 

Our October DVPS Meeting will be held Sunday afternoon, October 12th at 3 PM in the theater of the Edelman Fossil Museum, 66 Million Mosasaur Way, Sewell, NJ.  It will also be shown on Google Meet.  Information to access the Google Meet link for this meeting will be provided by email a day or two in advance.  

    Our speaker will be Dr. Ben Kligman,  Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. 

Dr. Kligman got his start in paleontology as a youngster exploring fossil sites around Pennsylvania and New Jersey with his family, particularly cretaceous coastal plain microvertebrates and in the early Mesozoic Newark Basin. During his undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Ben started working at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona studying Triassic microvertebrates. This research developed into the focus of his PhD at Virginia Tech, and now his postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Many of our biggest but most intractable questions about the history of life on Earth are obscured by outstanding gaps in the fossil record - Ben’s guiding philosophy is to use fieldwork to discover new fossil sites that fill these gaps, shedding light on questions ranging from the mysterious evolutionary origins of living amphibians, to the effects of continental drift and climate change on vertebrate communities.

     A recent article in National Geographic talked about Ben’s discovery of the oldest pterosaur in North America.

Despite evidence for one of Earth’s biggest mass extinctions in the oceans at the end of the Triassic (201.4 Million years ago), gaps in the non-marine fossil record obscure the timing and nature of tetrapod extinctions over this interval. Ben will discuss new fossil discoveries and radioisotopic dates from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic of North America that are clarifying the timing and pattern of faunal change over this transformative but poorly understood timeframe.  

     His talk is titled, “North America’s oldest pterosaur and other new fossils from the Triassic paleotropics of central Pangaea raise new questions about the end-Triassic extinction”.

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