In order to develop sample sets including macrofossils and microfossils, invertebrates and vertabrates, I work with great colleagues and excellent students to collect bulk sample series from key regions containing marine sedimentary rocks of the appropriate age! Below are some of the geographic areas I've worked, with project overviews and links to resulting papers.  

Northern Italy (Lombardian Basin)

Much of the Italian Alps are marine Triassic sedimentary rocks, with abundant shells, fabulously-preserved vertebrates, and tiny teeth and scales. I have worked on fossils from this region since 2014 to document the paleoecological changes among the invertebrates, trace fossils related to predators, as well as ongoing work with vertebrate microfossils. 

An outcropping of interbedded shales and carbonates from the Lombardian Basin

West-Central Nevada

Important limestone deposits outcrop in Nevada which document acidification in the oceans during the end-Triassic mass extinction, and my projects in this region include documenting paleoecological changes leading up to the mass extinction, identifying nearly a dozen Late Triassic marine vertebrates using microfossils, and correlating these sections to biostratigraphic series using strontium isotopes and carbon isotopes. Life continues to be strange in the early Jurassic here, with the proliferation of iron ooids after the mass extinction as the carbonate platform began to recover. 

A view of the Gabbs Valley Range

New Zealand, North and South islands

Extensive volcaniclastic deposits of the Late Triassic are found throughout New Zealand, representing an important high-latitude assemblage as both environmental and ecological conditions changed throughout the interval. My research group has worked in New Zealand to document changes in shelly invertebrates and microfossils of marine vertebrates - this work is in progress, with several publications in the works, so stay tuned!  

Black sands and shell beds at Kiritehere Beach, North Island. 

Eastern California

Not all my ongoing work concerns the Triassic! Some of the most important marine deposits of the latest Precambrian can be found in eastern California, where we have documented the first U.S. occurrence of microbial mat-mining organisms producing the trace fossil Lamonte trevallis - this occurrence is closely correlated with the first sediment-burrowing activity, marking the start of the Phanerozoic Eon! 

Oolitic conglomerates from before the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary

North Dakota and Montana

North Dakota and Montana are home to some of the best Cretaceous dinosaur fossils in the world, but also some impressive marine deposits like the Pierre Shale! Often the shelly marine fossils are observed encased in concretions - so what controls the formation of these strange features and the types of fossils found within them? Ongoing work in this area involved detailed paleontology and sedimentology of the Pierre concretions to document preservational controls! 

A broken concretion containing inoceramid bivalves and a nautiloid