Vertebrate Paleontology

After 80 million years, a giant fossil jaw has quite a story to tell. Back in the age of the dinosaurs, Tylosaurus proriger was a fearsome predator — a bus-sized aquatic reptile with a crushing snout, daggerlike teeth, and knack for swallowing prey whole...

For every two living vertebrates on Earth, one is a fish – 95% of which are ray-finned fishes such as salmon, tuna, goldfish, and trout. Ray-finned fishes comprise roughly 35,000 species and thrive in environments ranging from deep-sea trenches to alpine...

Stephanie Pierce, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Mansi Srivastava, Curator of Invertebrate Zoology co-developed a course for undergraduates with a goal of reaching a larger number of students and exploring similar sets of questions from different...

Studying climate change-induced mass extinctions in the deep geological past allows researchers to explore the impact of environmental crises on organismal evolution. One principal example is the Permian-Triassic climatic crises, a series of climatic...

Megan Whitney, postdoc in the Stephanie Pierce Lab, is the lead author on a paper that reveals how some mammals evolved their tusks. First, Megan and her colleagues had to define what exactly is a tusk. Read about the research in the New York Times and...

Tiago Simões, a researcher in the Stephanie Pierce lab and former Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Postdoctoral Fellow, knew he found something special when he examined a fossil specimen collected decades ago. The fossil belongs to a previously unknown...

Read about research led by former postdoc Katrina Jones, working in the Stephanie Pierce lab and MCZ Vertebrate Paleontology, in the Harvard Gazette. Jones and colleagues looked at the vertebrae of modern reptiles, mammals, and the extinct nonmammalian...

Stephanie Pierce, MCZ Faculty-Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, and Blake Dickson, Ph.D. ’20 analyzed 40 3D fossil humeri to better understand the transition from fin-to-limb and reconstruct the evolution of terrestrial movement in early tetrapods. The...

Research by MCZ postdoctoral fellow Tiago R. Simões has provided an extensive database that is helping scientists better understand the evolution of reptiles. Along with MCZ Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Stephanie Pierce , and other collaborators...