Who's Who
Christopher N. Jass, Ph.D., Curator, Quaternary Palaeontology
Chris joined the Royal Alberta Museum as Curator of Quaternary Palaeontology in 2008. He received his M.S. in Quaternary Studies at Northern Arizona University and received his Ph.D. in Geological Sciences from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He got his start in Palaeontology courtesy of an uncle, who took him traipsing around the Pierre Shale in South Dakota in search of Cretaceous ammonites. His dissertation research was based on fossils he excavated from a Pleistocene-age cave deposit in eastern Nevada. Other notable field experience includes assisting on research projects in Grand Canyon National Park (Pleistocene, Arizona), the Black Rock Desert (Miocene, Nevada), Oregon Caves National Monument (Pleistocene, Oregon), and the Chinle Formation (Triassic, Arizona). As a student, he worked in a variety of roles at the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota. Prior to joining the staff at the Royal Alberta Museum, he was a scientific associate at the Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory-Texas Memorial Museum. Broadly speaking, his research interests include cave palaeontology, Quaternary palaeoecology, arvicoline rodent biochronology, mammalian biogeography, and land snails.
Peter J. Milot, Jr, Assistant Curator, Quaternary Palaeontology
In addition to specimen preparation, cataloguing, and other standard duties, Peter has been developing better, cheaper methods of moulding and casting fossil specimens. He recently (2007) produced moulds of the most completely preserved, small, late Pleistocene horse (Equus conversidens) known, and will produce multiple replicas for exhibition in our Museum and elsewhere. The 11,300-year-old skeleton was recovered by University of Calgary faculty and students from a site in southwestern Alberta. This North American indigenous horse species was originally named on the basis of a single tooth from a cave in the Valley of Mexico.
Former curatorial program staff members
James A. Burns, Ph.D., Curator, Quaternary Palaeontology
(University of Toronto, 1984). Interests: biogeography and chronology of late Pleistocene fauna and flora in Alberta and North America; late Pleistocene glaciation, geomorphology (landforms), and chronology; timing of human entry into the New World, possibly through Alberta, from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge; late Pleistocene faunas of Heilongjiang Province, Peoples' Republic of China, as analogues of contemporary Albertan faunas. Dr Jim Burns retired from the Royal Alberta Museum in 2006.
