Paul first visited the Uinta Basin when he was working on his Ph.D. field work in the slightly older Bridger Formation located on the north side of the Uinta Mountains in Wyoming’s Green River Basin. Paul had known Beth since they were both students at CU Boulder, and he made numerous visits to the Uinta Basin prior to and during her Ph.D. field work and took an interest in the stratigraphy of the Uinta Basin. His interest was further fueled by his years of work as a paleontological consultant in the Basin, and he published on new fossil discoveries in the Duchesne River Formation their biochronological implications with Steve Walsh and Tom Kelly.
Paul’s research specialty is mammalian biostratigraphy, biochronology, paleoecology, and taphonomy with a focus on the Eocene, and most recently the Bridgerian and Uintan North American Land Mammal “Age” transition.
Paul’s responsibility on the team is the stratigraphic work. This involves studying the thick layer cake of strata deposited in lakes, rivers and on floodplains from roughly 46 to 38 million years ago. The sequence of clay, mud, silt, sand, and ash that comprises the Eocene rock units in the Uinta Basin and entombs the fossils preserved there needs to be documented in detail. The stratigraphy will provide a framework to which all the samples and data collected for the project will be tied. It will involve mapping, measuring and describing the rocks as well as associated relative positioning of fossil localities and collection of samples for zircon dating, oriented paleomagnetostratigraphy, palynology, and isotope analyses

Tony has been collecting in the Uinta Basin since he graduated Washington University in St. Louis in 1994. His undergraduate advisor, Tab Rasmussen, asked him to join the field crew that summer, and he worked there regularly through the early 2000's, and continues to visit and work on the fossils from the Basin. His specialty is carnivorous mammals, and he has described new species of carnivores from the Eocene of Utah, and has also worked on carnivores from Kenya.
The middle Eocene is an interesting time for carnivorous mammals in North America because you start to see the rise of true carnivorans (the ancestors of modern cats, dogs, weasels, etc.) and the decline in the extinct creodonts, the first group to fill the carnivorous mammal niche. By the end of the Eocene, most of the creodonts had gone extinct, and the carnivorans were starting to resemble the taxa we know today.
At UCLA Tony's primary responsibility is teaching, and he teaches most of the undergraduate human anatomy courses as well as a number of general education courses on biology. On of his primary duties as part of the Uinta Basin Project is to bring non-science major undergraduate students to collect in the Basin as part of a summer class, and show them how we collect information about organisms and climates in the past, and how we can apply that to studies of our own future.

Laura is the most junior member of the project team and has been working on and off in the Uinta Basin since 2006. After her Masters, Laura decided she wanted to focus her dissertation research on early primates, and that is when her PhD advisor, Gary Schwartz, contacted his friend from graduate school, Beth Townsend, to see if she could take another student to the field. Over the years, Laura became more involved in the Uinta Basin project and was privileged to become a PI of the project after she received her PhD in 2014.
Laura’s research centers on quantitative methods for reconstructing species interactions in the (mostly Paleogene) mammalian fossil record. She has previously focused on dietary competition of early Eocene North American euprimates and their potential competitors (e.g., plesiadapiform primates, rodents, etc.) by analyzing dietary niche overlap using dental characteristics. However, she has also considered the effects of abiotic factors (e.g., temperature, precipitation) on changes in paleocommunity structure. The paleocommunity used in this research was that of the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, and she looks forward to bringing this methodological expertise to the Uinta Basin. Thus, my primary role on the project is to quantify changes in community structure (if any) to help determine the extent to which the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO; 41.5-40 Ma) may have impacted the Uinta Basin paleocommunitygoes here

I am a story-teller, an artist, and a scientist.

My story begins at an early age when I discovered my fondness for animals and their forms through art. By middle school, my interest in their skeletal anatomies grew and I could name most of the bones in their bodies. By high school, I discovered photography and considered pursuing art for a career but decided to pursue my fascination with fossils.

Today, I spend my time exploring Earth's natural history through the study of geochemistry of mammal fossils. I travel to localities all over the world, finding fossilized teeth and analyzing their enamel to better understand the environment and habits of long-extinct animals. This has taken me back in time millions of years to times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, though I tend to stick to times well after the extinction of those fascinating giants.

As my love for learning continued to grow over the years so did my love for art and photography.

Now, I get to combine my passions through PaleoPix, a business in New York State dedicated to capturing and preserving the love of our pets and of nature.

As the owner of PaleoPix, I have the joy of helping people express their greatest passions for life and work through photography and illustration. And the best part is that I can continue to pursue science and share what I learn through art, photography, and outreach.

Karen E. McCormick began fieldwork in the Uintah Basin in 2004 while studying Anthropology as an undergrad and continues to enjoy collecting and identifying Eocene era fossils with the crew each field season to this day.

At the College of Charleston she was Professor’s Assistant under Dr. Dana Cope in 2004, and Anthropology Lab Manager 2005-2007, and she assisted Dr. Jaap Hillenaious in the Evolutionary Biology Lab 2005-2007. She continues at her day job as an attorney at Karen E. McCormick, PA.

Ivory has been a field assistant for the Uinta Basin Project since the summer field season of 2023 under the mentorship of Co-PI Anthony Friscia. Their main role in the Uintah Basin Project is to assist the team in the summer field seasons with collecting and general field tasks. They also hold the role of the website designer.

Ivory's current research interests lie with extinct Uinta Basin reptiles' skeletal anatomy, and they look forward to contributing to depictions and descriptions of Uintah Basin's unique lizards and mammilla alike.

Kelly first joined the Uinta Basin Project as a volunteer in 2021 and returned as a research assistant in 2022 and 2023. She was introduced to the project through her undergraduate coursework with Tony at UCLA. Her main role on the project has been supporting summer field classes that introduce non-science majors to fossil collection and the reconstruction of past climates and ecosystems, helping students connect ancient environments to present-day challenges. As a research assistant, her research focuses on Eocene lizards in the Uinta Basin and how body size and distribution shifted with changing climate during the Eocene Epoch. Additionally, she contributed to fossil collection in the Uintan and Duchesne River Formations and assisted with screen washing. Kelly is now pursuing a PhD, using paleoecological techniques to study mass mortality events in terrestrial animals.

Emma started working with the Uinta Basin Project during the 2021 field season. She did her senior honors project on the community composition of the Uinta Basin fauna based on the project’s extensive collection. After graduating from Grand Valley State University in 2022 with a BS in Biology, she continued working with UBP to develop an ex-situ screenwashing lab focusing on Duchesnean microfossils. She also presented a poster comparing Uinta 1 and 2 biochron communities at the 2022 Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Conference. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Guam, where she is working towards an MS in marine biology.