Vertebrate Paleontology

The Harvard Museum of Natural History (HMNH) recently hosted a visit by Constance Kite, a fossil preparator in the MCZ in the 1950's, featured in an iconic image with the MCZ Kronosaurus specimen. The specimen was found in Queensland, Australia in the...

A new paper in the MCZ journal Breviora describes a new species of tetrapodomorph sarcopterygian, Eusthenopteron jenkinsi. The species is named in honor of the late Dr. Farish A. Jenkins, Jr., beloved faculty member and curator of Vertebrate Paleontology...

Curatorial Associate Jessica Cundiff gave a behind the scenes tour of the Invertebrate and Vertebrate Paleontology collections to a lucky group of visiting Harvard Alumni. Jessica showed them notable specimens such as an authentic Kronosaurus skull...

The MCZ has received the partial skeleton of a 13,000-year-old mastodon excavated from a site in upstate New York. The Bowser Road mastodon, nicknamed John Charles, was donated by the three investigators responsible for excavating and reporting the find...

Graduate student Brianna McHorse and Faculty-Curators Stephanie Pierce and Andy Biewener used beam bending to investigate the evolution of digit reduction in horses. The research was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B and featured in the...

Read about MCZ Faculty-Curator Stephanie Pierce in the Boston Globe where she talks about what she does as a paleontologist.

The new Harvard Museums of Science and Culture exhibit SCALE: A Matter of Perspective includes MCZ glacite models of protists, a fossilized amphibian skull and a small diorama of the paleontological excavation that produced the skull. You can read more...

The S. Pierce Lab has been working with an online science educator from The Field Museum to produce educational videos highlighting research in the lab. Funded by a collaborative NSF grant, the lab is researching the evolution of the mammalian vertebral...