Moderator

• 
  Laura Durham

Participants

• 
  Randall Irmis

  Panelist

  Randall will moderate our discussion this evening. Dr. Randall Irmis is the Chief Curator and a Curator of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah. Randall received his BS in Geology (Emphasis in Paleontology) from Northern Arizona University and his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Randall’s research asks how vertebrate animals living on land evolved through geologic time, particularly in response to climate change and other global events. Much of his research has focused on the beginning of the age of dinosaurs, the Triassic Period. He is interested in how ecosystems changed during this time, and why dinosaurs become so successful while other animal groups died out? This research has resulted in extensive fieldwork in Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Argentina, and Ethiopia.

• 
  ReBecca Hunt-Foster

  Panelist

  ReBecca Hunt-Foster is the Monument Paleontologist and Museum Curator at Dinosaur National Monument. She was formerly the District Paleontologist for the Canyon Country District of the BLM, located in Moab. ReBecca holds a Master of Science in Geology (emphasizing in Vertebrate Paleontology) from Texas Tech University, and has a Bachelor’s of Science in Earth Science from the University of Arkansas. Her current research includes Early Cretaceous ornithomimosaurs from North America, the Upper Cretaceous Williams Fork Formation paleofauna of western Colorado and eastern Utah, the ichnofauna of the lower-middle Jurassic rocks of eastern Utah. ReBecca has worked as a paleontologist in western Colorado and eastern Utah since 2007.

• 
  Alan Titus

  Panelist

  Dr. Alan Titus has worked as the monument paleontologist at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for the last 20 years. He was the first full-time permanent paleontologist hired after the Monument's creation and has overseen the entire Kaiparowits Basin megafaunal renaissance. In 2013, he was honored with the naming of the horned dinosaur Nasutoceratops titusi in recognition of his contributions to the region's paleontology. His current research interests include magnetic stratigraphy, marine reptiles, ammonite diversity, a multi-individual tyrannosaur bonebed, dinosaur thermo-regulation, and the classification of early hadrosaur-like dinosaurs. Originally from Nevada, Titus has lived in Kanab for the last 16 years, where he enjoys hiking, skiing, mountain biking, and playing guitar in a classic rock cover band (named Mesozoic of course), when not out looking for fossils.

• 
  Carrie Levitt-Bussian

  Panelist

  Carrie Levitt-Bussian is a paleontologist and the Paleontology Collections Manager at the Natural History Museum of Utah. She manages and curates over 50,000 paleontological specimens at NHMU which includes vertebrate, invertebrate and paleobotanical fossils. She is also the Database Manager for these collections. She also spends many weeks out of the summer excavating dinosaurs in Utah, Nevada, Wyoming and New Mexico. She received her Masters of Science in geology (emphasizing in vertebrate paleontology) from the University of Utah in 2013 and has a Bachelor’s of Science in geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research is in ceratopsian limb bone histology studying how animals, like triceratops, grew and what their metabolism was like when they were alive.