Spring Break
University dinosaur expert, professor to appear on 'Animal Armageddon'
Betsy Cohen
Issue date: 3/5/09 Section: News
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Fastovsky, a paleontologist from Wakefield, is a leading expert on the mass extinction of dinosaurs.
He said he loves working at URI, but also enjoys traveling to areas such as Arizona, Montana, Mexico and Mongolia.
"I definitely like going to exotic places and seeing exotic things," Fastovsky said. "Anytime I can get out, that's good."
He said his job is composed of 50 percent research and 50 percent teaching.
"It's better for the students to hear [facts] from the people who are actually doing [research]," Fastovsky said.
Fastovsky has been researching the extinction of dinosaurs in Mexico since 1986. In 2005, he taught a course in sedimentology at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) while on sabbatical. During that time, he wrote papers on dinosaur extinction and published the book, "The Evolution and Extinction of the Dinosaurs." This year, he published "Dinosaurs: A Concise Natural History," the textbook used in his GEO 102 course.
In 2008, National Geographic funded his research on dinosaurs.
"We found some dinosaur bones in a place where nobody knew anything about anything," Fastovsky said. "Our job was to try to learn something about what the ancient environment was where those bones were exposed."
With his colleagues, he was able to determine dinosaurs became extinct approximately 65 million years ago.
"We have steadily built up the data until it was pretty much incontrovertible," Fastovsky said.
Fastovsky said his fellow researchers help him work out ideas while in the field
In 1991, Fastovsky and his colleagues published "the first nail in the coffin" on dinosaur extinction in "Science," a widely-known scientific journal.
"This is not the sort of thing that you just say and then forget about it," Fastovsky said. "You're making a major scientific conclusion which has serious ramifications for all kinds of things, so you publish it in different journals, add evidence over the years and continue to either falsify it or fail to falsify it. Eventually, it becomes a pretty robust idea."
