Regular Monthly Meeting for November

Who’s Who in the Marine Reptile Zoo

The Dallas Paleontological Society will meet next on Wednesday, November 12th, at 7PM Central time, in the Boonesville Auditorium (Room H125) of the Ellison Miles Building (Bldg H) at Brookhaven Campus of Dallas College, 3939 Valley View Lane, Farmers Branch.  Mike Polcyn of SMU will speak on “Marine Reptiles of the Western Gulf Coast of North America”.  Mike will tell us about the wide variety of Late Cretaceous marine reptiles in our region.  Not just mosasaurs, but also ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and marine turtles.

Mike was a member of the Dallas Paleontological Society while working as Chief Technology Officer at a telecommunications company.  He began affiliating with the Huffington Department of Earth Sciences at SMU, where he is now a Senior Research Fellow.  He founded their Digital Earth Sciences Lab, for the 3D capture of anatomy using CT and laser scanning, for visualization, computer modeling, analysis, and 3D printing.  He specializes in the systematics, evolution, and paleobiology of mosasaurs.  Many DPS members and associates have contributed their mosasaur finds to this effort.  Mike retired from his telecommunications career in 2008, and is now an honorary member of DPS with over 65 peer-reviewed publications.  He has performed field work in Nebraska, Kansas, Arizona, Texas, Arkansas, Israel, Mongolia, and Angola.

DPS meetings are free and open to the public, so invite anyone interested in science and fossils.  Members can bring snacks and food to share, and the society provides bottled water.  Everyone can bring fossils to show off or for identification help (particularly vertebrate fossils from the North Sulphur River,  which are a big part of Mike’s story).  Mike will be showing some new unpublished research, so we will NOT be streaming the meeting on Zoom this month.  Take this opportunity to brave the traffic and join us in person!

DPS