Prof. Paul E. Olsen will give us a lecture on “How Climate Change and Evolution Conspired to Make Dinosaurs Dominant for 136 Million Years”. It is Monday, February 11 at 7:30pm in the Gathering Room.
Our guest speaker, Prof. Paul E. Olsen, is a paleontologist and author of a large number of technical papers. As a teenager living in New Jersey, he found some dinosaur footprints and sent President Nixon a cast of one – resulting in Riker Hill Fossil Site’s being named a National Natural Landmark.
He received M.Phil. and Ph.D.degrees in biology from Yale in 1984. His interests and research examine patterns of ecosystem evolution and extension as a response to climate change over geological time, and of Triassic and Jurassic continental ecosystems.
He is the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Prof. Olsen’s talk should appeal to the child in all of us (dinosaurs) as well as the serious adult (climate change).