This guy rocks!
A Brooklyn College professor helped unearth a treasure trove of fossils that may help reveal essential secrets for understanding life as we know it.
“This discovery has produced a lifetime of fossils to work with,” said Stephen Chester.
Chester — along with a team of paleontologist and a group of Brooklyn graduate students — recently published a research paper on their findings, which will help scientists understand the critical time period just following the extinction of the dinosaurs, according to Chester.
“If you want to try to understand the origin of the modern world that we live in, this is one specific moment in time that is really critical to understand,” he said.
The group of researchers made the extraordinary discovery during an expedition to Colorado in 2016, when they uncovered stockpile of bones that was remarkably intact and unblemish — compared to most other fossils, which are just fragments of animal remains, said Chester.
“Everyone was incredibly excited immediately,” said Chester. “Even the students here recognized the significance of this because they had been studying these species mostly through teeth.”
One of Chester’s former Brooklyn College students said the professor was always eager to involve his students in the hands-on work like this.
“He was definitely a huge mentor, he was probably at this point the biggest influence on my career,” said Karen Cuevas, who is now pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. “He’s the kind of person where if there is any opportunity to involve his students he’ll jump at it.”
