Paleontologist to Present Lecture on Sauropod Dinosaurs and Their Lifestyles

Dr. Kristi Curry Rogers will present her lecture “From Madagascar to Microscopes: Breathing Life to Dinosaurs” on Thursday, Oct. 12 as part of The University of Alabama’s ALLELE lecture series.

Rogers is a vertebrate paleontologist at Macalester College, where she focuses on studying dinosaur evolution and paleobiology.

“She presents her work in an engaging and exciting way,” said Dr. Thomas Tobin, a professor of geology at UA. “And she examines how dinosaurs lived, which many people find interesting.”

During her lecture, Rogers will discuss her fieldwork in Madagascar, where she studies dinosaur life history, as well as using bone history to explore lifestyle patterns in extinct dinosaurs, living birds, and other vertebrates.

“Understanding how animals lived is important to understanding how environmental pressures may have shaped their evolution,” Tobin said. “In addition to examining how and why sauropods grew so large, she has also worked on understanding how one particular group of dinosaurs—modern birds—evolved.”

Currently, her research is focused on the evolutionary history of the latest surviving line of long-neck sauropod dinosaurs, the Titanosauria, which include the largest land animals that have ever lived. These dinosaurs existed globally during the Late Cretaceous period and interest Rogers because of the varied amount of size between different species of Titanosauria.

“Being a paleontologist is a lot more than just finding bones and naming species,” Tobin said. “There is a lot of scientific study that can be done on the bones themselves that can tell us new information about how the animal lived.”

The ALLELE lecture series is presented by the Evolution Working Group, a group of UA faculty or affiliated educators or scholars who are interested in evolution in their teaching or research.

Roger’s lecture will be held at North Lawn Hall at 7:30 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public, but seating is limited.

The ALLELE lecture series is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships and Goldwater Scholarships.

Learn more about the series at evolution.ua.edu, or visit ALLELE’s Facebook page for more information.