DinoFest 2017 Speaker: Dr. Celina A. Suarez
Rising Mountains: Using Chemistry of Dinosaur Remains to Understand the Climatic Effects of the Ancient Sevier Mountains
Scroll down for a video of Dr. Suarez's talk
Hear how Dr. Celina Suarez has studied the chemistry of dinosaur remains to better understand how they lived and their surrounding environment.
Dr. Celina A. Suarez's is an assistant professor and coordinator in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas. Her research focuses on using trace element and stable isotope geochemistry of fossil vertebrates and invertebrates to understand paleoecology, paleoclimatology, and taphonomy of ancient terrestrial ecosystems.
Suarez is particularly interested in past greenhouse climates and major climate shifts such as the mid-Cretaceous thermal maximum and the end Triassic extinction. She also uses carbon isotope chemostratigraphy to identify major global C-cycle shifts in Earth’s deep-time history.
Her research has taken her to locations such as the Cretaceous Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah, the Xinminpu Group of Gansu Province, China, the Prince Creek Formation off the North Slope of Alaska, and the Triassic-Jurassic Moenave Formation of Southern Utah.
A native of San Antonio, Texas, Suarez became an NSF Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at Boise State University where she used rare earth elements, stable isotopes, and infrared spectroscopy to understand bone preservation and diagenesis. She then joined the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas in August 2012. Recently, Geminiraptor suarezarum, a new dinosaur from the Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah, was named after Suarez and her twin sister, Marina, for discovering the site from which it came.