The Charleston Museum kicks off its 2015 fall lecture series
September 1, 2015
CHARLESTON, SC – On September 9, at 6:00 p.m., The Charleston Museum will kick off its 2015 Fall Lecture Series with The World’s Largest Flying Bird: A Fossil “Dragon” from Charleston, presented by paleontologist Dr. Daniel Ksepka. The 2014 publication of Dr. Ksepka’s paper, Flight Performance of the Largest Volant Bird, created worldwide buzz. The fossils of this world’s largest ever flying bird, the Pelagornis sandersi, are housed at The Charleston Museum and are the only examples of this species known to exist.
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Pelagornis sandersi, an extinct species of “bony-toothed” bird with a wingspan approaching 24 feet, soared over South Carolina during the Oligocene Epoch. During the Oligocene, elevated sea levels completely submerged modern day Charleston. A menagerie of ancient creatures, including primitive whales, sharks, sea turtles, and seabirds, that thrived in area waters became entombed in the sediments below when they died, only to re-emerge as fossil discoveries twenty-five million years later. Today, new research methods are unlocking the secrets of how these animals once lived. In his lecture, Dr. Ksepka will present the history of fossil discoveries that shaped our view of pelagornithid birds, the details of their remarkable skeletal adaptions, and insight from computer modeling into how a bird with a wingspan over twice as wide as a California Condor was able to fly.
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About the Lecturer
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Daniel Ksepka, PhD, is the Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT. Dr. Ksepka earned a BS in Geological Sciences from Rutgers in 2002 and a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia in 2007. He previously served as a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina and taught undergraduate and graduate courses at North Carolina State University. He holds Research Associate positions at the Field Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, and the American Museum of Natural History.
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Dr. Ksepka’s investigations into the fossil record and evolution of birds have been funded by the National Science Foundation and have brought him to Peru, New Zealand, and South Africa. In addition to authoring 40 formal peer-reviewed research papers and editing submissions for the Journal of Paleontology, he has written for popular science magazines such as Scientific American, American Scientist, and Dig as well as his personal blog, “March of the Fossil Penguins,” which attracts over 50,000 visitors per year. His first exhibition at the Bruce Museum, Madagascar: Ghosts of the Past, opened in April 2015.
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About The Charleston Museum
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Founded in 1773, The Charleston Museum is considered America’s first museum. Its mission is “to educate Charleston area residents and visitors about the natural and cultural history of the South Carolina Lowcountry through collections, exhibitions, preservation, programs and research.”
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