A List
4/7/03

DENVER PALEOBOTANIST TO DELIVER SLU LECTURE

CANTON - Kirk R. Johnson, curator of paleontology and head 
of the department of earth sciences at the Denver Museum of 
Nature and Science, will give the 2003 Susan Carolyn Ferguson 
Lecture at St. Lawrence University, titled "Tropical 
Rainforests, Dinosaurs and Drinking Water: Odd Urban Geology 
of the Denver Basin." The lecture, which is open to the 
public free of charge, will be on Monday, April 14, at 8 p.m. 
in Bloomer Auditorium, Brown Hall.
	Johnson co-directed the installation of the museum's 
"Prehistoric Journey" exhibit and is the lead author of two 
popular books, Prehistoric Journey: A History of Life on Earth 
(with Richard Stucky) and Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the 
Past 300 Million Years of the Colorado Front Range (with Robert 
Raynolds). His research focus is Late Cretaceous and Early 
Tertiary fossil plants and landscapes of the Rocky Mountain 
region. Johnson has led and participated in paleontological 
expeditions to Patagonia, the Canadian Arctic, New Zealand, 
Egypt, China and Mongolia, and has also researched the modern 
rainforests of the Amazon and Australia.
	He is best known for his research on fossil plants 
that is widely accepted as some of the most convincing support 
for the theory that an asteroid impact caused the extinction 
of the dinosaurs. Since 1997, Johnson has supervised the 
Denver Basin Project, a multidisciplinary effort to understand 
and interpret the geology, paleontology and hydrology of 
the rocks beneath Denver. He is presently collaborating with 
artist Jan Vriesen to complete a series of 10 paintings that 
depict ancient Colorado landscapes. These paintings will be 
installed in the new Colorado Convention Center in 2005.

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