Profile

Casual Bio

In early grade school, Ted was torn between being either a vertebrate paleontologist or a national park service naturalist, as at that time there was no way to do both.  He began his career at Colorado State University with emphasis on park service topics, but shifted to paleontology at the University of Alberta, lazily studying under his mentor, the great R. C. Fox.  To his surprise and delight, he was offered a position as the first paleontologist at Fossil Butte in Wyoming, an auspicious beginning of a thirty-year U.S. NPS career.   At Oregon’s John Day Fossil Beds, he was the catalyst and project manager for the acclaimed paleontological exhibits at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center.   He acquainted generations of workers with the complexities of the John Day basin through countless excursions, including the 2010 SVP Field Symposium.   Ted is the only paleontologist to ever become an NPS Regional Science Advisor which permitted him to visit parks from Joshua Tree to Wrangell-St. Elias, discovering new localities and significant fossils. 

Ted presently is a courtesy faculty member of the University of Oregon in the Department of Earth Sciences and the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, and a annuitant/volunteer with the U. S. National Park Service..  He has published and coauthored many papers and technical reports in the peer-reviewed and popular literature.  There are currently five species named in his honour.