Meet the Field’s new dinosaur curator: Jingmai O’Connor

By: Reign C, Xavier D

 

Catch our new dino expert on National Geographic on Thursday

The Field Museum is excited to announce its new associate curator of fossil reptiles: Jingmai O’Connor, a world expert on flying dinosaurs and the transition of dinosaurs into birds. (All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds—O’Connor focuses on the group of dinosaurs that includes birds, as well as a few of their cousins.)

O’Connor is originally from Pasadena, CA, and she got her PhD from the University of Southern California. For the past ten years, she’s worked as a professor at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. During her time there, she discovered a four-winged Microraptor with a new species of lizard in its stomach and helped show that a group of dinosaurs, the scansoriopterygids, had bat-like wings and could fly. She started her position at the Field Museum at the beginning of October.

O’Connor focuses on birds from the Mesozoic era—the time of the dinosaurs—and she’s eager to bring that expertise to the more recent (but still 50-million-year-old) bird fossils at the Field Museum. The Field is home to the world’s largest collection of fossils from the Wyoming’s Green River formation, which includes birds that are perfectly preserved in rock, feathers and all. “These are some of the best Cenozoic fossil birds in the world, and I’ve never been able to study them before,” says O’Connor. “I’m really excited to come to the Field and look at them through the lens of what I know about earlier birds, which I’ll also continue studying. I want to always be learning new things.”

In addition to her research piecing together the bird family tree and the evolution of flight in dinosaurs, O’Connor says she’s looking forward to sharing science with the general public.

“Paleontology is a gateway science,” says O’Connor. “People love dinosaurs, and we can use that to get them excited about science overall. When people learn about how science works, they can apply that to their understanding of other people and the environment. It’s a powerful tool for change.”

National Geographic will be interviewing O’Connor as part of a panel discussion over Facebook Live on Thursday, October 8, at 2pm ET; you can tune in at www. facebook.com/natgeo. Any reporters interested in covering O’Connor’s work, or in consulting with her on dinosaur stories, should feel free to reach out to press@fieldmuseum. org, and we’ll set it up! ###

Photo by Jesse Goldberg, taken while filming the PBS documentary When Whales Walked.