September 07, 2013 Meeting Info

Hello, my name is Kristen MacKenzie. I am currently the Assistant Collections Manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History. I graduated this June from University of Oregon with an MS in Geology (concentration in vertebrate paleontology). The journey to become a paleontologist has been long. I have been a field biologist, helitack, hotshot and archeological technician, but always with the goal of going back to school to study paleontology. Twelve years of volunteering for John Day Fossil Beds National Park kept me connected to the world of professional paleontology and gave me the skills to find new fossil sites all over the Pacific Northwest and Nevada. The fossil locality I will be speaking about-the first Arikareean (earliest Miocene) vertebrate fossil locality in southern Oregon is a site I re-discovered. Although it was originally found in the early 1960’s no one collected it or described it. It is producing an interesting collection of vertebrates for an age that is poorly represented elsewhere in the United States. Curiously, a few of the vertebrates found at my site are also found in Florida, Texas and northern Mexico. I will share with you the work that went into this site, the interesting geological implications and the unexpected fauna!