Name: Jim Kirkland – Keeping Up With The Raptors: Evolution of Ankylosaur Armor Across the J/K Boundary
Start: 2026-01-05T19:00:00-07:00
Location: Lloyd G Clements Community Center

$Jim Kirkland \u2013 Keeping Up With The Raptors: Evolution of Ankylosaur Armor Across the J\/K Boundary$

Save the date! #WIPS kicks off the New Year with a talk by Dr. Jim Kirkland, Utah State Paleontologist. This will be a hybrid event, in person at the Clements Center in Lakewood and online via Zoom. If you are not a member and would like information or the Zoom link, email [email protected] before 3 p.m. the day of the talk.
FULL TALK TITLE: Keeping Up With The Raptors: The Evolution Of Armor In Polacanthine Ankylosaurs Across the J/K Boundary
Dr. Jim Kirkland earned a BS in Geology from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, an MS in Geology from Northern Arizona University and a PhD in Geoscience from the University of Colorado. For the past 27 years, he has been the Utah State Paleontologist, permitting and promoting Utah’s paleontological resources for the public good. After telling people he would be a paleontologist at age five, has spent more than 50 years excavating fossils across the southwest US and Mexico authoring and coauthoring more than 100 papers on Mesozoic environments, biostratigraphy, paleobiogeography, and paleoecology; naming 24 new dinosaur species (including the giant “raptor,” Utahraptor and the best understood polacanthine ankylosaur, Gastonia), other tetrapods, many fossil mollusks and fossil fish. He has shown that Grand County, Utah preserves the most complete Lower Cretacous terrestrial sequence in the world