Degrees: Ph.D., M.S., University of Massachusetts, Amherst; B.A., Bates College

Interests:

I am a vertebrate paleontologist interested in birds and dinosaurs. Here at Wellesley I have taught labs in both the Geology department and the Biology department. My Ph.D. dissertation was on avian hindlimb locomotion differences that correlate with lifestyles rather than with phylogeny. I used a combination of anatomical differences and statistical analysis to associate certain morphologies with varying locomotion habits of non-passerine birds. My field work is more geology related. I am working in the Hell Creek Formation of northeastern Montana. I am working as a sedimentologist for a large multi-institutional (Museum of the Rockies, U.C. Berkeley, U. North Dakota, Hobart-William Smith, Wellesley) multi-faceted (vertebrate paleo, invertebrate paleo, paleobotany, taphonomy, sedimentology, paleo climate) project, whose goal is to reconstruct the changes in all of the above throughout the final 3 million years or so of the Mesozoic Era.

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Created by Maria Raffi mraffi@wellesley.edu
Last updated 9/22/02