I grew up with a passion for dinosaurs and everything science. Growing up in Wisconsin & California I had access to great museums but not many rock exposures. So for my undergraduate education I attend the University of Wyoming, where I am forever grateful for the field & museum experience I gained. Before graudate school I moved to Thermopolis, WY where I managed research, collections and display development at The Wyoming Dinosaur Center. Around this time, I also started producing what has become a large catalog of skeletal anatomy diagrams - interested parties can explore them at: www.skeletaldrawing.com.
My work at the WDC rekindled my drive to become a professional research scientist, so I relocated to Wisconsin to pursue a paleobiology Ph.D. My dissertation research emphasized mechanistic physiological modeling, mass extinction survivorship, and functional anatomy. These days I am still in Wisconsin, where I get to teach those same subjects to undergraduates in the Department of Integrative Biology. In addition to my academic pursuits, I have a wonderful wife and daughter, some fur-babies, and in what passes for free time I enjoy movies, photography, gaming, and cheering for the Green Bay Packers.
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PhD in Geoscience (Paleobiology), 2020
University of Wisconsin-Madison
BSc in Zoology, 2013
University of Wyoming
The last two decades have seen a remarkable increase in the known diversity of basal avialans and their paravian relatives. The lack of resolution in the relationships of these groups combined with attributing the behavior of specialized taxa to the base of Paraves has clouded interpretations of the origin of avialan flight. Here, we describe Hesperornithoides miessleri gen. et sp. nov., a new paravian theropod from the Morrison Formation (Late Jurassic) of Wyoming, USA, represented by a single adult or subadult specimen comprising a partial, well-preserved skull and postcranial skeleton. Limb proportions firmly establish Hesperornithoides as occupying a terrestrial, non-volant lifestyle. Our phylogenetic analysis emphasizes extensive taxonomic sampling and robust character construction, recovering the new taxon most parsimoniously as a troodontid close to Daliansaurus, Xixiasaurus, and Sinusonasus. Multiple alternative paravian topologies have similar degrees of support, but proposals of basal paravian archaeopterygids, avialan microraptorians, and Rahonavis being closer to Pygostylia than archaeopterygids or unenlagiines are strongly rejected. All parsimonious results support the hypothesis that each early paravian clade was plesiomorphically flightless, raising the possibility that avian flight originated as late as the Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous.