The September 2026 General Meeting will be held on Friday, September 11th, 2026 at 8:00 PM via Zoom. Our presentation is by Franklin Duffy, PhD Student and Research Affiliate from The Field Museum and Denver Museum of Nature & Science. He will be presenting “Searching for Colorado’s Tiktaalik on the West Coast of Laurentia.”
This presentation is a spotlight on our fieldwork in the Late Devonian Parting Formation of Colorado and the transitional “fishapod” fossils that can be found there. This talk will be a deep dive into why the timing, depositional environment and fossil taxa suggest that this is a great place to find an incredibly significant transitional fish fossil.
Franklin Duffy, a PhD student in University of Chicago’s Committee on Evolutionary Biology, is leading a team of scientists in central Colorado to search for transitional fish fossils. These fossil fish—referred to as “stem tetrapods”—mark the transition from fins (fishes and other marine creatures) to limbs (land-dwellers) which occurred about 375 million years ago during the Late Devonian Period. Many stem tetrapods from this time period, such as the famous Tiktaalik, have been discovered in rocks that formed on the east coast of the Devonian paleocontinent Laurentia. Franklin and colleagues have their eyes set on rocks of the same age from Laurentia’s west coast, which have not been sampled to nearly the same degree and are exposed across central and southwestern Colorado. This incredibly important research may lead to new transitional fish fossil discoveries right in our backyard!
Franklin received his B.A. in Geology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2022 and previously worked at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in their Digital Research Lab. His fieldwork will span multiple summers prospecting and collecting in the Devonian Parting Formation in Glenwood Canyon. His work has already uncovered many new field localities, some with articulated specimens. 🦴
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Topic: ESCONI General Meeting Sept 11, 8:00PM
Time: Sep 11, 2026 08:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada)
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