Advisory Board and Editors Paleontology
Gary Rosenberg
Pilsbry Chair of Malacology, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and Professor, Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science, Drexel University. Commissioner, International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. Editor for Mollusca, World Register of Marine Species and MolluscaBase.
His research focuses on the origins and magnitude of diversity of the Mollusca, with active research currently in the Philippines (marine and terrestrial mollusks) and Jamaica (land snails). He uses biodiversity databases to better document the known diversity of mollusks and to estimate their total diversity.
Erik R Seiffert
Erik Seiffert's research is focused on the phylogenetic relationships, adaptations, and historical biogeography of mammals, with an emphasis on the endemic placental mammals of Africa and Arabia. He has a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley (1995), an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin (1998), and a Ph.D. from Duke University (2003). He was previously Lecturer in Palaeobiology and Palaeoenvironments at University of Oxford and Curator of Geological Collections at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (2004-2007), Assistant and Associate Professor of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University (2007-2016), and is now a Professor of Integrative Anatomical Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California (2016-Present). He is also a Research Associate at the Duke Lemur Center's Division of Fossil Primates and in the Department of Mammalogy, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
Haijun Song
Dr. Haijun Song is currently a professor of Paleontology and Geobiology in China University of Geosciences. He obtained bachelor and Ph.D in Paleontology from China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). He was a Marie Curie Fellow in the University of Leeds. His main research interests include mass extinction events, macroevolution, paleodiversity and paleoenvironment changes, geobiology database, and AI applications in paleontology. He has served as the chief scientist of several national projects and has published more than 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has been actively involved in the International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP 572, 630).
Matt Sponheimer
Matt does research on the ecology of early hominins and associated fauna in Africa. He has also directed and co-directed several multidisciplinary projects on the ecology of living mammals, both large and small, in South Africa. He is the director of the Nutritional and Isotopic Ecology Lab (NIEL) at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Clara Stefen
PhD in Biology in Bonn, Postdoc in Berkeley, Museum of Paleontology. Currently Curator of Senckenberg Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden.
J.g.m. Thewissen
Ingalls-Brown endowed Professor of Anatomy at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Author of 'The Walking Whales.' Associate Editor of PeerJ, the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society and the Journal of the Palaeontological Society of India. Co-Editor of the 'Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals,' and 'The Bowhead Whale, Balaena mysticetus, Biology and Human Interactions.'
Emanuel Tschopp
Emanuel Tschopp received his MSc in paleontology 2008 at University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his PhD in 2010 at Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, under the supervision of Prof. Octávio Mateus. After postdocs in Portugal, Italy, and the USA, he is now a Humboldt Fellow at University of Hamburg. His main research interests are the dinosaur and lizard systematics and phylogeny with a focus on sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in the USA, and extant and extinct lacertid lizards. Furthermore, he is an actively working on improving the methodology of phylogenetic analysis based on phenotypic data, and developing approaches to quantify intraspecific variability to use in species delimitation.
Sara Varela
I am working on Pleistocene mammal extinctions. Co-developer of R packages to download data from open access databases (rAvis and paleobioDB), and team member of www.ecoClimate.org, an open access repository to access climatic data for the past, present and future.
Mathew J Wedel
I am a vertebrate paleontologist, and my main areas of interest are sauropod dinosaurs and the evolution of pneumatic (air-filled) bones in dinosaurs and birds. I'm also interested in the evolution of heads and necks in vertebrates, and in the nervous systems of very large animals. I've been fortunate to coauthor three papers naming new dinosaurs: the sauropods Sauroposeidon (2000) and Brontomerus (2011), and the early horned dinosaur Aquilops (2014). I am currently an Associate Professor at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California, where I teach gross anatomy. In 2016 my book "The Sauropod Dinosaurs: Life in the Age of Giants", with artist and lead author Mark Hallett, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
In my spare time I enjoy stargazing, and I write the monthly Binocular Highlights column and the occasional feature article for Sky & Telescope magazine.
Ingrid M Weiss
Professor for Biobased Materials at IBBS - Institute of Biomaterials and Biomolecular Systems, University of Stuttgart, Germany.
Past Head of Biomineralization at INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbrücken, Germany and Private Lecturer "Biochemistry" at the University of Regensburg, Germany.
Peter Wilf
After my eclectic and non-geological 20s, I discovered geology and then paleobotany and have never looked back. Most of my thesis research (Penn Geology) was done in residence at the Smithsonian, on megafloral and paleoclimatic change across the Paleocene-Eocene boundary in southern Wyoming. During this time and in an ensuing Smithsonian postdoc, I began developing two major subsequent themes of my research: the fossil history of plant-insect associations and the remarkable riches of Patagonian fossil floras. I spent three years at Michigan, 1999-2002, as a Michigan Fellow and happily joined the Penn State Geosciences faculty in 2002, where I have been developing these and several other wonderful research projects with my students and colleagues all over the world.
Huiting Wu
Dr. Huiting Wu is a lecturer in the School of Geosciences and Surveying Engineering at China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing) in Beijing, China.
Dr. Wu's research focus is on taxonomy, palaeoecology and morphology of brachiopod, mass extinction and biotic recovery. She is also interested in ecology and morphological changes of brachiopod in modern ocean, bivalves and ammonoids.
Dr. Wu is a graduate of China University of Geosciences (Wuhan). Between 2016-2017, she was a visiting scholar in Deakin University. Between 2018-2010, she was a post-doctors fellow in the Peking University.