DinoFest 2020 Speaker: Dr. Julia Clarke
Title of Lecture: Survivorship at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary: the role of records from the high southern latitudes
Lecture Description: Dr. Clarke will review evidence for the identity of bird fossils from Antarctica as well as ways these southern high latitudes records may be key to the global understanding of the dynamics at the Creatceous-Paleogene boundary.
Bio: Julia A. Clarke is Wilson Professor in Vertebrate Paleontology at The University of Texas at Austin, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She has published over 100 papers including 12 in the journals Nature and Science. She is interested in how new structures and functions arise in deep time with a focus on the evolution of dinosaurs including birds. She has an international field program in paleontology (e.g. in Antarctica, South America, Asia) as well as leading highly interdisciplinary collaborative teams integrating data on living animals to ask new questions of the fossil record. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and received her degrees from Brown University and Yale University.