Palaeontologist and curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum Dr Emily Bamforth uses fossils to recreate ancient worlds, painting a vivid picture of Alberta’s polar dinosaurs of 65 million years ago. She shares her philosophy of deep time, her interest in evolutionary ‘failed experiments’, and how the study of ancient life has shaped her unique perspective.

Bio:

Dr Emily Bamforth is the Curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Alberta, Canada. She completed a BSc with Specialisation in Evolutionary Biology at the University of Alberta, which sparked a fascination in the origins of multicellular life on Earth. She went on to do a MSc degree at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario under Dr Guy Narbonne. Her fieldwork in Mistaken Point, Newfoundland explored fossils of the oldest complex multicellular life on the planet, from which she described three new species. Returning to her first love (dinosaurs), Dr Bamforth completed a PhD at McGill University in Montreal under Dr Hans Larsson, with a thesis based on the dinosaur mass extinction in Saskatchewan. After graduating in 2014, she went on to work as a palaeontologist with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, where her research focused on Late Cretaceous and early Cenozoic paleoecology and paleobotany, as well as mass extinction. She began as Curator of the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in 2022, where her work focuses on late Cretaceous paleoecosystems with an emphasis on understanding the relationships between paleoclimate, paleobotany and dinosaur ecology. Dr Bamforth is an adjunct professor in the University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences and the University of Saskatchewan’s Geological Sciences Department. In her free time, Dr Bamforth enjoys hiking, photography and singing in choirs.

Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with music by Carl Didur.