30th Annual Tate Field Conference
Schedule
Fri, 29 May, 2026 at 08:00 am to Sun, 31 May, 2026 at 06:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
125 College Dr (At the South End of Campus), Casper, WY, United States, Wyoming 82601 | Casper, WY
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30th Annual Tate Field Conference We hope you'll join us for the 30th Annual Tate Field Conference, "Twilight of the Dinosaurs: Terrestrial Life in the Cretaceous May 29 – May 31. The conference features a day of speakers (Saturday, May 30) and two days of field trips (May 29 and May 3). Saturday includes a full day of presentations, lunch, dinner and keynote speaker. This year’s keynote speaker is Kirk Johnson, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where he oversees the world’s largest natural history collection. Johnson will present “The Forests, Meadows, and Ponds of the Late Cretaceous,” May 30th at 6:00pm at the Ramkota Hotel, 800 N. Poplar. Johnson's research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of dinosaurs, and he has excavated fossils on all continents. He has hosted several PBS shows including Making North America, The Great Yellowstone Thaw; Polar Extremes; Ice Age Footprints; and Walrus: Life on Thin Ice.
We also have two great field trips planned:
Friday’s field trip will be to the type Lance Formation area in eastern Wyoming. The Lance was deposited in the latest Cretaceous and has produced many dinosaur remains as well as non-dinosaurian fossils from the end of the Cretaceous. We will visit sites that have been worked on by Tate Museum crews for years, including the Lee Rex site and several bone beds. There will be time for prospecting. This is less of a collecting trip, but rather a show and tell.
On our field trips we usually allow personal collecting and/or collecting for your institution, but the Tate Museum and the landowner would have first rights of refusal for any fairly complete or unusual specimens found on this trip.
The Sunday field trip will be to two different sites in the Mesa Verde Formation. The Mesa Verde is a little older than the Lance, preserving fossils form the Campanian Age. The two sites we will be visiting have produced remains from many different animals, from little mammal teeth to parts of large dinosaurs. The sites are both on BLM lands. We will be collecting here with the permission of the BLM with appropriate BLM surface collecting permits. All fossils found will be curated at either the Tate Museum or the University of Wyoming Geology Museum.
Field trips require some walking on natural terrain, and are therefore not wheelchair friendly.
You can learn more about the talks and tours, and download a registration form here https://www.caspercollege.edu/conference/
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Where is it happening?
125 College Dr (At the South End of Campus), Casper, WY, United States, Wyoming 82601Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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