Origins of Rainforest Vegetation, Denver Basin, Colorado, USA
Did the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K–Pg) mass extinction give rise to a tropical rainforest in present-day Castle Rock, Colorado, USA? Twenty years ago, a diverse angiosperm-dominated flora with many large, entire margined leaves with drip tips provided evidence for a 63.8 million year old in-situ, “tropical rainforest” along the Front Range in central Colorado. However, the majority of botanic affinities of the diverse Castle Rock flora remain unknown, which is critical to understanding whether the flora should be classified as a rainforest or a temperate forest with large leaves due to unusually high regional rainfall conditions. My postdoctoral research includes intensive taxonomic study of well-preserved fossil leaves and reproductive remains from Castle Rock to determine (1) composition, as it relates to other Paleocene floras and the evolutionary significance of lineages present; (2) biogeographic and structural analogs of the forest; and (3) fruit and seed dispersal strategies, as they relate to structure and ecology of modern and Paleocene forests.
Eocene-Oligocene Patagonian Paleofloras, Argentina
I am a part of the Patagonian Fossil Floras project led by my former PhD and MS advisor at Penn State, Peter Wilf. I am interested in the origins of icehouse vegetation in southern South America and how it relates to climate change and tectonic isolation that began after the early Eocene climatic optimum. My dissertation includes re-characterizing the composition of the middle Eocene Río Pichileufú flora, paleoecological analysis and comparison of Río Pichileufú with the early Eocene Laguna del Hunco flora, and earliest Oligocene conifer systematics. My master's project focused on Eocene Araucaria fossils from Argentina, and was published (May 2020) in the American Journal of Botany! More on that, here!
GIS Geostatistical Modelling of the K-Pg Boundary in the Williston Basin, North Dakota & Montana, USA
While at DMNS I pioneered a new method for using GIS to make a predictive model of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary for curator Tyler Lyson and collaborators to use in paleoecology studies. We used differential GPS to create a high resolution dataset of K-Pg geologic contacts across the study area, then interpolated these into a surface in GIS, allowing us to map all the fossil localities relative to the boundary. I am writing the paper up now for this project and also did a talk at the GSA annual meeting in 2016 on this work.
Paleoelevation of the Central Rocky Mountains, USA
For my undergraduate thesis at Colorado College I worked with my advisor, Henry Fricke, and collaborator, Liz Cassel (University of Idaho), to study the paleoelevation and paleorelief history of the Central Rocky Mountains and adjacent Great Plains during the late Eocene using the known relationship between elevation and hydrogen isotope fractionation. I collected ash beds in Colorado and Wyoming and processed them in the lab to isolate volcanic glass shards for geochemical analysis. I presented on this work at the AGU 2015 fall meeting in San Francisco.I am particularly interested in comparing the geochemically and paleobotanically derived estimates for paleoelevations, given the abundant regional fossil plant deposits of the same age.