Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academics

Distinguished Lecture Series

Title: Hunting for Dinosaurs in the Sahara.

Paul Sereno, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
University of Chicago

Thursday, February 15, 2001, at 7:30 p.m.
Rudder Auditorium
Texas A&M University

About the Speaker

Paul Sereno grew up in Naperville, a suburb of Chicago, and studied art and biology as an undergraduate Northern Illinois University. While earning a doctorate in geology at Columbia University, he began studying dinosaur fossils at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Traveling around the world, he studied and photographed dinosaur fossils in far flung collections in China and Mongolia. In 1987, he joined the University of Chicago faculty, where he is Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy. He teaches paleontology and evolution to graduate and undergraduate students and human anatomy to medical students.

His field work began in 1988 in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina, where his team unearthed the first complete skeletons of the primitive dinosaur Herrerasaurus. Returning to this area in 1991, Sereno's team discovered a small skeleton belonging to a new species they named Eoraptor "dawn raptor." A primitive cousin of Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor measures only 3 feet from snout to tail tip. Ancient volcanic ash beds discovered near these early dinosaurs allowed Sereno's team to determine their age--228 million years old--and date the dawn of the dinosaur era. These discoveries shed light on the roots of the dinosaur family tree and on how and when dinosaurs came to dominate the land.

In the early 1990s his field efforts shifted to Africa--to rocks exposed in the Sahara Desert dating to the end of the dinosaur era when the continents were drifting apart. Expeditions to Niger in 1993 and 1997 and Morocco in 1995 resulted in many discoveries including the first skulls and skeletons of dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period on Africa. These and other fossils document the course of dinosaur evolution on Africa, as it drifted into geographic isolation 100 million years ago. Sereno's overall aim is to map the dinosaur family tree by tracing the many evolutionary changes recorded in their skeletons. The patterns of change recorded on the branches of the evolutionary tree are key to understanding of how evolution works over millions of years.

Many documentaries record Sereno's efforts, and he has written popular articles for National Geographic and Natural History magazines as well as a book on Tyrannosaurus for young readers.