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Join the CSU Paleontology Field School (ANTH 470), gain hands-on paleontological field experience, and earn 4 credits this summer!
Course Specifics:
Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin holds fossil-bearing sediments that date back to a time well before dinosaurs up through the Age of Mammals. Its early Cenozoic strata contain the ancestors of modern mammals – including the first artiodactyls (even-toed ancestors of deer, hippos, etc.), the first perissodactyls (odd-toed ancestors of horses, rhinos, etc.), the first rodents, and – importantly – the first true primates, Adapoidea and Omomyoidea.
Based out of Greybull, Wyoming, students will learn how to identify fossil localities, map sections, and collect vertebrate fossils from the earliest Eocene beds in the Bighorn Basin in which extinct primates are known, and how to prospect for new fossil-bearing localities. We are excited to offer this new opportunity for our students.
ANTH 120 (Human Origins and Variation) or BZ 110 (Principles of Animal Biology) or Attributes of Living Systems; Admission to this field course requires instructor permission based upon submission of a Paleontology Field School application. Please contact the course instructor for application information at kimberly.nichols@colostate.edu; Contact instructor to request an override
Please contact Kim Nichols for full information about applying at kimberly.nichols@colostate.edu.
kimberly.nichols@colostate.edu
Kim Nichols was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. Her undergraduate education at the University of California at Santa Cruz included extensive participation in nonhuman primate anatomical research, casework experience in forensic anthropology, and archaeological research at the State of California Mission Santa Cruz site.
Her graduate education at the University of Colorado at Boulder included field research on howling monkey locomotor behaviors in Costa Rica. In addition, she participated in primate paleontological field research at sites in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and in the Fayum Depression in Egypt.
Additionally, she has studied primate skeletal and dental variation in museum collections in Washington DC, New York City, and Chicago, Illinois. Kim's current research interest is in nonhuman primate skeletal dimension variation in captive and wild populations and implications for the interpretation of reproductive pathways in extinct primate species.