Matthew Carl Lamanna is a

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

and the assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he oversees the

dinosaur Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago (mya), although the exact origin and timing of the evolution of dinosaurs is t ...

collection.

Education

Lamanna graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, New York in 1997. He received high honors in biology and geology. Lamanna went on to get his M.A. and Ph.D. in earth and environmental science from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

Discoveries

Lamanna first gained fame for the 2000 discovery of '' Paralititan'' in Egypt, called by some as the "largest dinosaur ever discovered". The

sauropod Sauropoda (), whose members are known as sauropods (; from '' sauro-'' + '' -pod'', 'lizard-footed'), is a clade of saurischian ('lizard-hipped') dinosaurs. Sauropods had very long necks, long tails, small heads (relative to the rest of their bo ...

was 80 feet long and weighed between 40 and 50 tons. The discovery was the feature of a 2-hour A&E documentary '' The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt''. Beginning in 2004, Lamanna began work on a series of digs in China. The result, first published in the journal ''Science'' in June 2006, was the discovery of ''

Gansus yumenensis ''Gansus'' is a genus of aquatic birds that lived during the Aptian age of the Early Cretaceous (Aptian-Albian) period in what are now Gansu and Liaoning provinces, western China. The rock layers from which their fossils have been recovered are ...

,'' a missing link in the early evolution of birds.

External links

Lamanna's CV at Carnegie Museum

“Remarkable Alum” entry at Hobart and William Smith Colleges website
– The Washington Post
Ducklike Fossil Points to Aquatic Origins for Modern Birds
– Scientific American American paleontologists Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Scientists from New York (state) University of Pennsylvania alumni Hobart and William Smith Colleges alumni Waterloo, New York {{paleontologist-stub