Katja Knoll

Katja Knoll is lab manager and volunteer coordinator for the Monument’s paleontology lab in Kanab, Utah, the interim stop for many a fossil excavated from the Late Cretaceous rocks of GSENM. She earned her MSc in Geology from the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, investigating the escape burrowing behavior of modern and Devonian freshwater bivalves. While pursuing her degree, she has also worked as research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she studied preservation and diagenetic effects on Late Cretaceous mollusk shells. Although a fairly recent arrival to the team, she has pursued knowledge of the Kaiparowits fossil mysteries with unbridled passion. As a result of this bonebed discovery, she has developed an abiding interest in terrestrial vertebrate taphonomy and stratinomy.

Dr. Alan Titus is the Monument Paleontologist for GSENM, a position he has held since 2000. Most of that time he has been unravelling the fossil mysteries of the Kaiparowits region, culminating in the 2013 publication of the edited volume, “At the Top of the Grand Staircase: The Late Cretaceous of Southern Utah.” His main research interests are Cretaceous stratigraphy, ammonite paleontology, and the thermoregulatory physiology of large dinosaurs during hot house climates. In 2013, Dr. Titus was honored with the naming of a new centrosaurine horned dinosaur, Nasutoceratops titusi.

Scott Richardson has been conducting paleontology fieldwork in GSENM since 2004. He has discovered and excavated many important dinosaur specimens in the Monument, including the type specimen of Kosmoceratops richardsoni, the most ornate dinosaur ever discovered in the southern U.S..

February 2016