Time Scavengers

Growing up in Denver, Colorado, Victoria developed a passion for paleontology by frequently exploring the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. She later got her bachelor’s degree in geology from Colorado College and her master’s degree in geology and paleontology from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Victoria’s research focuses on understanding ancient ecosystems from the Late Cretaceous period (the time of the dinosaurs) and the early Paleocene (the time just after the extinction of the dinosaurs). She uses two different approaches to do so:

 1- Geochemistry – She measures the carbon and oxygen isotopes in fossil dinosaur teeth to learn about what the dinosaurs were eating and drinking. Tooth enamel is made up of several different elements, including oxygen and carbon. When the tooth enamel is made inside the body, the oxygen ingested by an organism from its drinking water is incorporated into the chemical structure of the enamel. And the carbon in the tooth enamel comes from the food the organism eats.  In this case, Victoria is looking at the teeth of herbivorous dinosaurs, so the food is plants. Victoria is interested in where the dinosaurs are getting their water and food. She asks questions like, “are dinosaurs drinking water from large rivers that flow down from mountains? Or are they drinking water from ponds and streams on the floodplain? And are the plants they are eating close to the banks of these water sources or are they farther away?”  

2 – Paleobotany – She also measures the size and shape of fossil leaves to determine what the average temperature was when the leaves were alive and how much it rained at that time. This helps her to determine what the climate was like in the past. She is also curious about how plant communities recovered after the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. This is the extinction that famously killed the dinosaurs, but also about 60% of plant species in North America went extinct too. So when she looks at the size and shape of fossil leaves to learn about the climate of the past, she also analyzes how many different types of leaves there were. This helps her to answer questions like, “how soon after the extinction did plant communities start to increase in diversity (meaning number of plant types)? How soon after the extinction did we start to see forests and rainforests in North America?” 

Along with geology and paleontology, Victoria is also passionate about education and STEM outreach. She is a certified Environmental Educator and has spent summers teaching science and leadership at the Keystone Science School and the Logan School for Creative Learning in Colorado.  She is also the host of the podcast Ask a Scientist, in which she interviews scientists asking them questions written by elementary and middle school students. She encourages everyone, including aspiring scientists, to be curious about the world around them and to always ask questions.