Asher J Lichtig

I am a research associate with the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. I have been fascinated with turtles for as long as I can remember and have been in particular fascinated with the fossil tortoises of New Mexico since being introduced to them in 2011. New Mexico is home to a continuous record of tortoises from their first global appearance almost until the modern day. This makes it an ideal area to study their evolution. I studied how to identify the paleoecology of fossil turtles for my masters thesis and continue to find this an interesting avenue of research. In particular the early members of the tortoise's evolutionary lineage are an interesting issue are they terrestrial like modern tortoises or more aquatic like their closest living relatives? Additional, details of these turtles morphology are necessary to firmly answer these questions. We hope through our research to reduce the assumptions involved in inferring these animals habits.

January 2019