Grad student Kaitlin Maguire has researched and written a new feature on the Proboscidea — elephants and their relatives — for the UCMP website. This endeavor grew out of her recent work as a consultant on a 2011 exhibit at the San Jose Children’s Discovery Museum. The exhibit focused on Lupé, the mammoth whose bones were discovered along the Guadalupe River in 2005. UCMP staff and students excavated the bones soon after the discovery.
Kaitlin’s primary research interest is in “… understanding the relationship between climate, biogeographic distributions, and mammal evolution during the Cenozoic,” but now she’s become something of a mammoth maven!
Read about Kaitlin’s work with the Children’s Discovery Museum in these August 2009 and January 2010 blog entries. Learn more about Lupé’s discovery, and see many photos chronicling the excavation and preparation of her bones, beginning here.
At left, Kaitlin in the field (southern Oregon) this past summer. Photo by Win McLaughlin.