Expedition to the End of the Earth

An illustrated Weeknights at the Wagner lecture:
Expedition to the End of the Earth: The Antarctic Peninsula Paleontology Project
By Kerin Claeson, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
Museum open until the talk begins at 6pm.

During the Cretaceous period, Antarctica was teeming with dinosaurs, reptiles, mammals, fish, and plants. That changed suddenly when, 65 million years ago, a mass extinction wiped out more than half of the world’s species and set Antarctica on a course to being the icy, inhospitable environment we know today. In 2016, a group of intrepid researchers travelled to the continent to collect fossils of these bygone creatures—fossils that have unlocked new information about life, species dispersal, and evolution before and after the extinction. Expedition member Kerin Claeson, an Anatomy Professor at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, joins us to share her adventures fossil hunting in Antarctica and her exciting research into the fossils collected.

About the speaker: Dr. Kerin Claeson is an Associate Professor of Anatomy in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She received her Ph.D. in Vertebrate Paleontology from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on comparative vertebrate anatomy, human anatomical variations, and evolutionary biology.