DinoFest 2018 Speaker: Dan Chure
DinoBite — 2 p.m.
"Tracking Ancient Animals in an Ancient Desert: Dinosaurs and Other Creatures of the Nugget Sandstone"
Join Dr. Chure, recently retired paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, and discover how the western United States is home to some of the most mysterious fossils in the world. During the latest Triassic, this region was dominated by a vast sand dune sea. Although the environment was hostile, a surprising number of different groups of animals flourished in it. See and hear about the small mammal-like reptiles that left their marks including a cast of a 5 foot-long scorpion trail.
Dan Chure has had a passion for dinosaurs since he was a child. That obsession was fueled by visits to the American Museum of Natural History. His entire professional paleontological career (1979 – 2017) was spent as the paleontologist at Dinosaur National Monument where he oversaw the resource stewardship and science programs for the monument’s fossil resources. His research interests have focused on the evolution of dinosaurs and the ecosystems they lived in, public education about fossils, and the conservation challenges of in-situ fossil exhibits. For the last decade he has been working on the paleontology and paleo-environments of the great desert that covered the western United States in the Late Triassic.