I work on a variety of topics including: taphonomy (everything that happens from death to discovery), dinosaur vertebral anatomy, histology (microscopic anatomy), pachycephalosaurs (the "dome-headed" dinos), dinosaur vision, fossil laws and regulations, dinosaur biomechanics (how they moved), stegosaurs (the triangular plated, spiky-tailed dinos), ontogeny (growth and development), soft-tissue preservation, dinosaur behavior, and human-fossil cultural interactions (such as describing a fossil manatee relative in an ancient Egyptian catacomb).
But my main area of specialization and interest is dedicated to sauropod (the "long-necked") dinosaurs. Sauropods are some of our most iconic dinosaurs; their body plan visually symbolizes "dinosaur" for many, and sauropods grace everything from the logo of Sinclair Oil to "Littlefoot" from The Land Before Time.
Sauropods were the largest terrestrial animals that have ever walked the Earth (both body length and mass); yet the longest and heaviest terrestrial titans hatched from eggs no larger than cantaloupes, and within 2-3 decades achieved such colossal proportions. I'm incredibly interested in deciphering the life histories of sauropods in order to understand everything from how long it took them to grow up, how their skeletons changed throughout growth, how they even moved being so large, how they behaved, how they fed, what their soft-tissue anatomy was like, and so much more.
