Paleobiology

I’ve had an almost life-long interest is in paleobiology. When I was about 5 or 6 years old, my family visited the La Brea Tar Pits near Los Angeles, CA. I was amazed the the fossils and announced that I wanted to become a paleontologist when I grew up. My Mother cautioned against this on the grounds that “there’s no money in it.” So I became a biologist.

Still, I remain fascinated by paleobiology and have done some work in this field.

I worked with C. Richard Tracy and J. Scott Turner on a biophysical analysis of heat transfer in sailed pelycosaurs (Dimetrodon). Later, Peter Ward and I looked that the physiological and biogeographic consequences of changes in oxygen levels over the Phanerozoic. We argued that Pangea was not a super-highway but that foothills would have been barriers to dispersal. We also used a similar approach to evaluate how high hypothetical “paleomountaineers” would have done on Mt. Everest over the Phanerozoic. In the oxygen-rich Permian, they could have climbed 1/3 higher than Mt. Everest. In the oxygen-poor Triassic, they could not have reached an altitude equivalent to base camp on Mt. Everest.

1986.	A biophysical analysis of possible thermoregulatory adaptation in sailed pelycosaurs, pp. 195-206. In: N. Hotton, III, P. D. MacLean, J. J. Roth, and E. C. Roth, eds., Ecology and Biology of Mammal-like Reptiles. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. (third author, with C. R. Tracy and J. S. Turner).
2005.	Hypoxia, global warming, and terrestrial Late Permian Extinctions. Science 308:398-401. (First author, with P. D. Ward).
2005.	Climbing a triassic Mount Everest: Into thinner air. JAMA-Journal of the American Medial Association 294(14): 1761-1762. (First author, with P. D. Ward)