Ian Miller, PhD

Department Chair of Earth Sciences, Curator of Paleontology and acting Curator of Geology
PhD, 2007, Yale University
303.370.8351
ian.miller@dmns.org

Dr. Miller first began working at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science as an undergraduate at Colorado College during the late 1990s. He received his PhD in geology and geophysics from Yale University and returned to the Museum in 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow. Dr. Miller began as curator of paleobotany and invertebrate paleontology in 2008.

Dr. Miller studies fossil plants, paleoclimate, paleoecology, and tectonics. His research focuses on how fossil plants can be used to estimate paleoclimate, and, in turn, how that information can be used to determine how the earth has changed on geologic time scales. He is also a taxonomist who studies Late Mesozoic and Early Cenozoic fossil floras from North America.

Dr. Miller’s current research projects include studying the uplift of the Colorado Front Range; the paleolatitudinal displacement of Cretaceous and Paleogene terranes on the west coast of North America; plant extinction and diversity changes across the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary in the Denver Basin; and the taxonomy of select Late Jurassic through Eocene floras in the American West.

• Dr. Miller's Curriculum Vitae (PDF | 44KB)

• Surface Uplift of the Colorado Front Range
• Paleolatitude of Cretaceous and Paleogene Terranes on the West Coast of North America
• Taxonomy of Late Mesozoic and Early Cenozoic North American floras
• Denver Basin Project

Raynolds, R., Johnson, K. J., Ellis, B., Bowring, S., Dechesne, M., Miller, I. M., 2007. Earth history along Colorado’s Front Range: Salvaging geologic data in the suburbs and Sharing it with the citizens: GSA Today, vol. 17, no. 12, doi: 10.1130/GSATO1712A.1

Pott, C., Miller, I. M., Kerp, H., van Konijnenburg-van Cittert, J. H. A., & Zijlstra, G. 2007. (1791) Proposal to conserve the name Pterophyllum (fossil Bennettitales) with a conserved type: Taxon, vol. 56(3), p. 966-967.

Miller, I. M. and Prevec, R. 2006. Palaeobotany in the digital age: Unearthing the future of taxonomy: Palaeontologia Electronica, vol. 9 (2), editorial.

Miller, I. M., Brandon, M., and Hickey, L., 2006. Using leaf margin analysis to estimate the mid-Cretaceous (Albian) paleolatitude of the Baja BC block: Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol. 245, p. 95-114. doi: 10.1016/j.epsl.2006.02.022.