Please note where pre-registration is required.

Tracking Dinosaurs Around the World
Friday, April 21 at 7:30 p.m.

Lecture and slide presentation by international expert on fossil footprints, Dr. Martin Lockley, University of Colorado at Denver.
Location: Chatham High School Auditorium, Chatham, NY. Admission $12, students $6.

The lecture will be followed by Dr. Lockley's booksigning.
For more information contact us at 518.672.0116 or info@natureinstitute.org

For directions to Chatham High School, click here.

From Fantasia to Jurassic Park to Dinotopia, generations of people have been captivated by imaginations of a time when the world was still young and the earth was actually populated with creatures that are the stuff of science fiction. While fiction and fantasy lend themselves well to filling in gaps that the facts cannot provide, we are beginning to discover that scientists can tell a story just as enchanting and captivating. It is the story that spans the past, present, and the future of the Earth and tells of the connectedness of all things.

Fossil footprints are the only direct evidence of the behavior of extinct animals, and provide a record of life activity from the far distant past. Dr. Martin Lockley, the world's premier fossil footprint expert, has been tracking dinosaurs for over 25 years. Dr. Lockley has studied thousands of tracks in sites around the world. While fossilized bones reveal something of the form of the animal, fossilized footprints give revealing clues about herding behavior, migration, and social hierarchy. One question still hidden in the fossil records that he hopes to solve is: did the large animals nurture and protect their young as do our present-day, large, herd animals, or did they lay their eggs and leave as a reptile does? If there is any answer to this question, footprints will tell it, and Martin Lockley is the one most likely to solve this paleontological mystery.

As a youngster growing up in South Wales, Martin Lockley was not at all interested in dinosaurs, but lived on a nature reserve and was constantly surrounded by living animals. Observing real-life animal behavior from an early age has given him a marked advantage in studying fossilized behavior. He entered Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he caught the "dinosaur bug" from his professor. From that moment there was no looking back. He entered Birmingham University in England, received a Ph.D., and in 1980 joined the faculty of the University of Colorado at Denver. He has traveled the world studying dinosaur tracks and founded The Dinosaur Trackers Research Group. They have collected more than 1000 fossil footprints in the most varied research collection of fossil footprints anywhere in the world-including the only known footprint of Tyrannosaurus rex, measuring over three feet long.

Dr. Lockley has written both scholarly and popular books on his subject and is an engaging lecturer and radio/television guest. Books by Martin Lockley: The Eternal Trail: A Tracker Looks at Evolution, Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, Tracking Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of the Western United States (with Adrian Hunt), Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fossil Footprints of Europe (with Christian Meyer).

In addition to this lecture, Dr. Lockley will teach in The Nature Institute's Goethean Science Studies Program. There he leads the workshop Dynamic Patterns in Nature: The Example of Dinosaurs. For details see Calendar of Events listing. Anyone interested in participating in the workshop should contact us for advanced registration at 518.672.0116 or info@natureinstitute.org