Monsters from Deep Time: The Life and Death of Giant Nevada Ichthyosaurs

Neil Kelley and Randy Irmis will discuss new discoveries from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park and other Nevada fossil sites that shed new light on the lives of Nevada’s state fossil, Shonisaurus. What did they eat? How did they reproduce? When did they go extinct?  All these questions and more will be answered! 

Neil Kelley is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist with a special interest in extinct marine reptiles that were the top ocean predators during the Mesozoic (the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’). He has participated in fossil excavations in China and across North America, including multiple sites in Nevada, and worked in museum collections around the world. Currently his work includes projects in Nevada, California, Alaska, and Tennessee. His research has been featured in High Country News, Smithsonian Magazine Online and on National Pubic Radio. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution before coming to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Randall Irmis is Curator of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics, both part of the University of Utah, where he has worked since 2009. He received his BS in Geology (Emphasis in Paleontology) from Northern Arizona University in 2004, and his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Randy’s scientific research asks how animals with backbones (and the larger ecosystems they lived in) evolved through deep time, particularly in response to climate change and other global events. This work investigates fossil ecosystems and environments that span in age from over 300 million years old to less than 10,000 years old, and has resulted in many years of fieldwork in Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Argentina, and Ethiopia.