About
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Introduction
I am a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University in the Center for Science Outreach. My research is focused on assessing species' responses to abiotic and biotic factors using paleodietary reconstruction, diversity analyses, and biogeography. My teaching interests lay in communicating technical scientific concepts to high school and college students using hands-on, interactive lesson plans and experiential learning opportunities.
Publications
Publications (11)
The gomphotheres were a diverse and widespread group of proboscideans occupying Eurasia, North America, and South America throughout the Neogene. Their decline was temporally and spatially heterogeneous, and the gomphotheres ultimately became extinct during the late Pleistocene; however, the genus Cuvieronius is rarely represented in late Pleistoce...
In 2008 a rich accumulation of vertebrate bones and teeth was discovered in a small tributary drainage to Big Cypress Creek near the town of Hockley in Harris County, Texas. The fossils were recovered from sandy sediments of fluvial origin, interspersed with contemporaneous spring boil deposits, attributed to the Deweyville Formation and the recove...
A new species of mastodon from the Pleistocene of western North America,
Mammut pacificus sp. nov. is herein recognized, with specimens identified
throughout California and from two localities in southern Idaho. This new taxon
differs from the contemporaneous M. americanum in having narrower teeth, most
prominently in M3/m3, as well as six sacral v...
Stable carbon isotopes preserved in enamel can be used to reconstruct the diets of extinct organisms; over the past few decades, this method has been used extensively to understand the dietary preferences of extinct proboscideans, including mammoths and mastodons. While the dietary ecologies of these taxa are well-understood, gomphothere diets are...
The Columbian mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) and the American mastodon (Mammut americanum) have traditionally been considered to have been ecologically distinct, with mammoths often characterized as cosmopolitan grazers or mixed feeders and mastodons as forest-dwelling browsers. However, these large-bodied proboscideans occupying temperate, often reso...
A mammoth skeleton found at the Newton Site, a kettle lake 15 km southeast of Towanda, Pennsylvania, has been referred to Mammuthus columbi on the basis of its high, narrow skull. However, the specimen's thin enamel (1.3–1.8 mm) and moderately high lamellar frequency (8–8.75 lophs/dm) resemble some specimens of Mammuthus primigenius. Prehistoric ra...
Stable carbon isotopes preserved in enamel can be used to reconstruct the diets of extinct organisms; over the past few decades, this method has been used extensively to understand the dietary preferences of extinct proboscideans, including mammoths and mastodons. While the dietary ecologies of these taxa are well-understood, gomphothere diets are...
The input of massive amounts of carbon to the atmosphere and ocean at the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM; ∼55.53 Ma∼55.53 Ma) resulted in pervasive carbonate dissolution at the seafloor. At many sites this dissolution also penetrated into the underlying sediment column. The magnitude of dissolution at and below the seafloor, a process known...
