Understanding the paleontology of the Denver Basin is a major on-going project by the Denver Musem of Nature & Science. We collaborate with many local land owners, local municipalities, conservation groups, and the Colorado Department of Transportation to access fossil-rich sites along the Front Range. Our work focuses on understanding the paleoclimate of Colorado, the origin of rainforests, the extinction of plants at the KT boundary and subsequent recovery, the evolution of modern forests, and the uplift history of the Colorado Rockies.     

Late Cretaceous floras are common the Western Interior Basin but very few have been studied with modern techniques. With the exception of a few basins on the eastern edge of the Rockies, there exists a nearly complete literature gap for post-Cenomanian and pre-Maastrichtian megafloras. The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) in southern Utah has tremendous unrealized potential for the study of Late Cretaceous vegetation. Over the last two and a half years, our crew from the Denver Museum has been working with Dr. Scott Sampson and his team from the Utah Natural History Museum, Dr. Alan Titus from the BLM and Dr. Eric Roberts from the James Cook University in Australia to find new megafloral sites in the Dakota, Wahweap, Straight Cliffs and Kaiparowits Formations in the GSENM. Our initial work in the Campanian Kaiparowits Formation has begun to flesh out an exceptional vegetation to match the already spectacular dinosaurian fauna from the same sequence.

The Wind River Basin Project is a new collaborative effort to understand the response of terrestrial plants, animals, and their interactions to the long-term global warming during the Early Eocene. We are specifically asking whether the interactions between animals and plants are effected by gradual temperature change, whether the floral and faunal communities undergo coordinated responses to climate change, and whether most of the terrestrial ecosystem change occurs with long-term climate trends or abrupt climate events. At DMNS, this project is led by Dr. Richard Stucky, Dr. Bob Raynolds and me. We collaborate with Dr. Ellen Currano at the University of Miami, Ohio; Dr. Henry Fricke, The Colorado College; Dr. Will Clyde, University of New Hampshire; Dr. Amy Chew, Western University of Health Sciences; Dr. Deborah Anderson, St. Norbert College; and Dr. Sam Bowring, MIT.