Assistant Director (Collections and Research), Emeritus

Mark studies how dinosaur bones change with growth and how fossil bone is preserved.

Burning questions: "What's the difference chemically and mineralogically between an unaltered modern bone and a fossil bone? What is the effect, if any, of the burial environment on the mineral and chemical properties, and how do you measure it?"

Sidelights: Mark is also researching the behavior and life history of pachycephalosaurs (dome-headed dinosaurs) and ceratopsids (horned-dinosaurs), particularly Triceratops.

His favorite thing about research: "The field of paleontology is much more integrative now, and working with colleagues from geochemistry, biology, and medicine, makes research both fun and challenging. Probing fossils with particle beams and X-rays, or slicing thin sections only 100's of microns thick, provides a wealth of new questions and projects. Plus I enjoy traveling to new places and meeting new people!"

Selected Publications

• Nirody, J.A., M.B. Goodwin, J.R. Horner, T.L. Huynh, M.W. Colbert, D.K. Smith, and D.C. Evans.  2022.  Quantifying vascularity in the frontoparietal dome of Stegoceras validum (Dinosauria: Pachycephalosauridae) from high resolution CT scans.  Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Read it

• Woodruff, D.C., M.B. Goodwin, T.R. Lyson, and D.C. Evans. 2021. Ontogeny and variation of the pachycephalosaurine dinosaur Sphaerotholus buchholtzae, and its systematics within the genus. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 193:563-601. Read it

• Nesbitt, S.J., Stocker, M.R., Chatterjee, S., Horner, J.R., Goodwin, M.B. 2021. A remarkable group of thick-headed Triassic Period archosauromorphs with a wide, possibly Pangean distribution. Journal of Anatomy, 239:184-206. Read it

• Cullen, T.M., F.J. Longstaffe, U.G. Wortmann, L. Huang, F. Fanti, M.B. Goodwin, M.J. Ryan, D.C. Evans. 2020. Large-scale stable isotope characterization of a Late Cretaceous dinosaur-dominated ecosystem. Geology v. 48, https://doi.org/10.1130/G47399.1 Read it

• Goodwin, M.B., R.B. Irmis, G.P. Wilson, D.G. Demar, Jr., K. Melstrom, C. Rasmussen, B. Atnafu, T. Alemu, M. Alemayehu, S.G. Chernet.  2019.  The first confirmed sauropod dinosaur from Ethiopia discovered in the Upper Jurassic Mugher Mudstone.  Journal of African Earth Sciences, 159 (2019) 103571.  Read it