Liz takes a break from looking at fossil plants to enjoy the resting spot this living juniper offers!

Liz Lovelock

Geologist / Paleobotanist

John Day Fossil Beds National Monument

Liz began working at John Day Fossil Beds in June of 2009 through the Student Careers Experience Program (SCEP) while enrolled in the Master’s program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Department of Earth Science. Her Master’s thesis research focuses on the Eocene Moonlight Flora from Plumas County, California. Because the Moonlight flora shares taxa with fossil floras from the Eocene Clarno formation found within John Day Fossil Beds, Liz says she jumped at the opportunity to do research here. Her favorite floral species, Macginitiea angustaloba, belongs to an extinct genus from the Platanaceae family. First described from the Clarno formation, it is also found in the Eocene of Northern California. We hope to get a photo of it up on our website soon!

Liz earned her undergraduate degree in Geology and Environmental Science from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was during her undergraduate studies that she had her introduction to the formal discipline of paleobotany by way of a summer field internship working in the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, with Scott Wing from the Smithsonian. One day while carefully wrapping in toilet paper the fossils they had just collected, Liz asked “whose job is it to unwrap all these fossils?” “It could be yours,” was the reply. The focus of that internship would evolve into Liz’s senior thesis, and her collaboration with Smithsonian researchers is ongoing. Because of her interests in plant fossils and teaching, Liz applied to graduate programs and went on to work with Bruce Tiffney at UCSB.

When Liz is not studying rocks, she enjoys climbing them!

Publications:

Lovelock, Tiffney (2009) “The Eocene Moonlight Flora, Plumas County, California, and the Clarno Connection” Abstract and poster for Geological Society of America Annual Meeting, Portland, October 2009

Lovelock, Tiffney (2008) “An Early Paleogene Paleobotanical Paleoclimatic Analysis of the Northern Sierra Nevada” Abstract and poster for Geological Society of America Cordilleran Section and Rocky Mountain Section Joint Meeting, March 2008

Currano, Wilf, Wing, Labandeira, Lovelock, Royer (2008). Sharply increased insect herbivory during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences vol. 106, no. 6, 1960-1964

Lovelock, Wing, Currano (2006) “A PETM Flora from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, USA” Abstract and poster for

“Climate and Biota of the Early Paleogene” international meeting, June 2006, Bilbao, Spain