Dr. Freedman Fowler Joins Dinosaur Museum

The Great Plains Dinosaur Museum is pleased to announce that Dr. Liz Freedman Fowler will be joining their staff this summer. Dr. Freedman Fowler completed her PhD this spring at Montana State University under the guidance of Dr. Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies. Her dissertation research focused on hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs) of the Judith River Formation of Montana. She collected and described two new species of hadrosaur dinosaurs from the Rudyard area, and compared them to closely related species such as the hadrosaur Brachylophosaurus canadensis from the Malta area. The hadrosaur fossils at the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum and Phillips County Museum were very important to her doctoral research, and she is very excited for the opportunity to spend more time studying Malta's wonderful fossils.

Dr. Freedman Fowler is originally from Florida, and attended Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania for her bachelor's degree in geosciences. She began digging dinosaurs with the Museum of the Rockies right after graduating high school, and has continued doing fieldwork in Montana nearly every summer since then, first as a volunteer, and as a field crew chief since 2004. She has been the coordinator for the paleontology fieldwork volunteers at the Museum of the Rockies since 2007. During this time, she led Museum of the Rockies crews in collecting a bonebed of a new species of Gryposaurus, the skeleton of a new species of hadrosaur closely related to Brachylophosaurus, a new undescribed species of ceratopsian (an older relative of Triceratops), a partial juvenile tyrannosaur, and several Triceratops skulls and skeletons. While completing her doctorate, she also taught human anatomy labs at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Michael Morser, President of the Board of Directors for the Great Plains Dinosaur Museum states "we are very pleased that Dr. Freedman Fowler is joining our staff this season. We have an exciting lineup of exhibits and programs this year, including our Junior Paleo Program that features and field and lab experiences and our Adult Field Experience Program with tentative excursion dates the final weekend of June and the last week of July 2015." Contact the museum at 406.654.5300, email them at [email protected] or visit their website at http://www.greatplainsdinosaurs.org

GPDM opens for the 2015 season on May 1st and is open throughout the summer months, Monday through Saturday 10 AM to 5PM. They are closed Sundays but will consider special tours for large groups of 8 or more as staff is available.