Assistant director Mark Goodwin is in Ethiopia for several weeks as part of a collaborative project with UCMP alums Greg Wilson (University of Washington) and Randall Irmis (Utah). Together with colleagues from the University of Oklahoma, Addis Ababa University, and Mekelle University in Ethiopia, the team is investigating non-marine Mesozoic ecosystems from the Northwestern Plateau, Ethiopia.
Mark reports “we had great success in the Late Jurassic units and it is gratifying working with Ethiopian students and staff from the Earth Sciences Dept at Addis Ababa University. In the late Jurassic Mugher Mudstone, in addition to turtles, fish, croc teeth and verts, we found a partial crocodile skull with brain case and parietals, partial lower jaw, many allosauroid-like theropod teeth at almost every site and finally some large dinosaur bones – still fragmentary but we’re getting there – and very rich micro vertebrate localities that just have to have mammals – collected some bags of sediment from each. Working with the Earth Sciences Dept at Addis Ababa University has been great and hopefully a model for future work and lots of opportunity for collaboration, including informal science.”
This collaborative research project, “US-Ethiopia planning visit for the investigation of non-marine Mesozoic ecosystems from the Northwestern Plateau, Ethiopia,” is funded by the National Science Foundation grant NSF-CNIC-1444238.
