HWS News
11 September 2019 • Alums Digging for Dinosaurs on Pulteney Street Podcast
Episode 5: Matt Lamanna 97
Matt Lamanna '97, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, shares the excitement and insights of his career as a paleontologist on the latest episode of the Pulteney Street Podcast: Inside HWS with Joyce Jacobsen.
Lamanna, who will give the keynote address during the Colleges 2019 Convocation ceremony, discusses with President Joyce P. Jacobsen his lifelong passion for dinosaurs, the discoveries he has made on his expeditions to all seven continents, and his ongoing research.
At the Carnegie Museum, Lamanna serves as the museum's principal dinosaur researcher, studying dinosaurs, birds and crocodilians from the Cretaceous Period, the third and final time period of the Mesozoic Era, or the Age of Dinosaurs. He is the lead scientific adviser for the museums "Dinosaurs in Their Time" exhibit, which includes the nation's third largest display of mounted original dinosaur skeletons.
A pivotal contributor to the understanding of how dinosaurs and their environments evolved through time, Lamanna is one of the very few paleontologists in history to have found fossils of these animals on all seven continents. His research has received coverage in many major national and international publications and programs, including CNN, The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, National Geographic, the Associated Press and the journal Science.
After graduating with High Honors and a B.S. in geoscience and biology, Lamanna studied dinosaur paleontology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he earned his M.S. and Ph.D.
While pursuing his Ph.D., Lamanna went on an expedition to Egypt in search of a lost dinosaur site first found in 1911. It was there that Lamanna and collaborators discovered Paralititan stromeri (tidal giant), a gigantic new species of sauropod, or long-necked plant-eating dinosaur.
The discovery in 2000 was the first of many and led to a study 18 years later that detailed the 2013 find of another new sauropod from the Egyptian Western Desert, Mansourasaurus shahinae. Lamanna and coauthors wrote that Mansourasaurus is the most completely known dinosaur from the last 30 million years of the Mesozoic Era in Africa. He told USA Today that the discovery "was the culmination of a search thats occupied almost half my life."
Originally from Waterloo, N.Y., where he still has many family and friends, Lamanna has visited campus for public lectures, was featured on WEOS and gave a presentation in the President's Forum Series to share his global expeditions and discoveries.