Posts by Josh Mathews

Author

Josh Mathews

Josh is the Engelhardt-Moore Director of Paleontology at the Burpee Museum and a PhD Candidate in Biological Sciences at Northern Illinois University. He received Bachelors degrees in Biology and Geology from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2003 where he studied invertebrate paleoecology of Mississipian and Pennsylvanian deposits in Illinois. In 2004, Josh started volunteering in the fossil prep lab at Burpee and has been part of the Burpee family ever since. In the summer of 2005, he joined the Burpee expedition to southeast Montana that led to the discovery of the sub-adult Triceratops, Homer. The Homer Site became the focus of Josh’s Master’s thesis at NIU. Upon completion of the Homer project, he accepted the position of Chief Fossil Preparator and Research Assistant to Dr. William Hammer in the Geology Department at Augustana College. While at Augustana, Josh was part of the Transantarctic Vertebrate Paleontology Project and was part of an expedition to search for dinosaurs in Antarctica in the winter of 2010/2011. The fossils collected during this expedition were brought back to Augustana College where he worked on removing the remains from the rock in his prep lab. In 2014, he left his position at Augustana and returned to NIU to pursue his PhD in the Department of Biological Sciences. As a PhD student working for Dr. Karen Samonds, he spent two field seasons searching and excavating fossils in Cenozoic deposits in Madagascar. For his doctoral research, he is studying the biostratigraphy of the Hell Creek Formation in Carter County, Montana and documenting faunal change throughout the formation up to and across the K/Pg boundary.