About

I grew up with a passion for dinosaurs and everything science. Living in Wisconsin and then the Bay Area of California, I had access to great museums but not many rock exposures. To remedy this, for my undergraduate education I attended the University of Wyoming, where I am forever grateful for the field and museum experience I gained. Before graduate school I moved to Thermopolis, Wyoming, 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 osteographs. Interested parties can explore them at www.skeletaldrawing.com.

My wife, daughter and I relocated to Madison, Wisconsin, where I pursued a PhD in paleobiology. My dissertation research emphasized mechanistic physiological modeling, mass extinction survivorship, and functional anatomy. These days I am still in Madison, where I teach those same subjects to undergraduates in the Department of Biology.

In addition to my academic pursuits and wonderful family, we have some fur-babies, and in what passes for free time I enjoy movies, photography, gaming, and cheering for the Green Bay Packers.

Education

2020 PhD, Geoscience (paleobiology), University of Wisconsin–Madison
2013 BS, Zoology, University of Wyoming

Science communication & media

Alongside research and teaching, I consult on documentaries and films that want their extinct animals to reflect current science, from anatomy reviews to original reference art.

Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC Studios, 2025), scientific advisor
Prehistoric Planet (Apple TV+), scientific advisor for all three seasons
The Dinosaurs (Netflix), character designer

The full list of credits is at skeletaldrawing.com and on IMDb.

Grants & awards

2024–25 UW–Madison Instructional Laboratory Modernization grant, to modernize the teaching labs in Noland 315 and 321
2020–21 UW–Madison Instructional Laboratory Modernization grant, for the ZOO 430/612 lab in Noland 321
2020 C.F. Schiesser Outstanding Student Research Paper Award, Department of Geoscience, UW–Madison, for Hartman et al. 2019
2018 George J. Verville Award in Geology and Geophysics, UW–Madison
2017 L&S Teaching Fellow, College of Letters & Science, UW–Madison
2016 Experiment.com crowdfunding for “Describing a Jurassic maniraptoran dinosaur from the Morrison Formation of North America”
2015 Communication-B Teaching Assistant Fellow, UW–Madison
2004 Jurassic Foundation grant, for CT scanning a new Jurassic coelurosaur
2001–02 B.O.C.E.S. grants, for a human evolution display and a reverse-classroom human origins course
2000 Wyoming Geological Association travel grant