DinoFest 2018 Speaker: Dr. John Hutchinson
Keynote Lecture — 12 p.m.
"Dinosaur Movement: From Humble Beginnings to Earth-Shaking Giants"
Join keynote speaker Dr. John Hutchinson as he reviews his team's research on how dinosaurs moved and how their walking and running changed over time, from their distant quadrupedal ancestors to multiple origins of bipedal motion to major changes with evolving gigantism, flight, and more.
Professor Hutchinson loved dinosaurs as a kid like so many do, forgot that love as a teenager, then had his passion rekindled by reading and viewing “Jurassic Park” and taking science classes as an undergraduate in Zoology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, finishing in 1993. He then went on to do a PhD in Integrative Biology at the University of California in Berkeley from 1995-2001 (with Prof. Kevin Padian and others), focusing on the evolution of dinosaur locomotion and anatomy. He spent two years as a mechanical engineering postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University nearby before departing the USA for a faculty job in the United Kingdom, where he has been since 2004; as a full Professor of Evolutionary Biomechanics since 2011. He has worked on hundreds of living and fossil species including dinosaurs, elephants, crocodiles and more; and has been featured in 14 science or nature documentaries including “T. rex Autopsy” and “Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur” most recently.