A large dromaeosaurid (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Eastern Utah

I was born, August 24, 1954 in Weymouth, Massachusetts, USA. My academic profile following Marshfield Highschool was B.S. Geology, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, M.S. Geology, Northern Arizona University & Ph.D. Geoscience, University of Colorado. I spent two year teaching geology at the University of Nebraska and ran the participant funded dinosaur paleontology program at the Dinamation International International Society in western Colorado for 9 years. Currently, Utah State Paleontologist (Senior Scientist) with Utah Geological Survey over the past 26 years, permitting and promoting Utah’s paleontological resources for the public good. After telling people I would be a paleontologist at age 5, I have spent more than 50 years excavating fossils across the southwest US and Mexico receiving more than my fair share of honors, authoring and coauthoring more than 100 papers in Mesozoic environments, biostratigraphy, paleobiogeography, and paleoecology; taking part in naming 24 new dinosaur species (including the giant “raptor,” Utahraptor and the best understood polacanthine ankylosaur, Gastonia), other tetrapods, many fossil mollusks and fossil fish. I have shown that Grand County, Utah uniquely preserves the 4-5 oldest Cretaceous dinosaur faunas in North America because of local salt induced subsidence, which opened up the opportunity to study terminal Jurassic extinction for first time. My research on the lower Cretaceous of Utah indicate that the full opening of the North Atlantic was about 120 million years ago and followed by 20 million years of North America’s isolation as an island continent, and has dated the origins of Alaska and the first great Asian-North American faunal interchange at about 100 million years ago.