Western Heritage Museum & Lea County Cowboy Hall of Fame 
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Thursday, January 26, 2016

5:30pm

Dinosaur Exhibit Opening

This year we will be opening two dinosaur exhibits simultaneously. 1. Dinosaur Discoveries from the American Museum of Natural History. 2. Dinosaurs from New Mexico from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
Saturday, January 28, 2017

10am-2pm

Family Fun Day

Spencer Lucas will be here from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science talking about New Mexican dinosaurs.  He will talk at 11am and 1pm with a book signing following.  A dinosaur movie will be shown at 2pm.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

2pm

Classic Film Series

The Producers (1968)


Producers Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom make money by producing a sure-fire flop.

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January 26, 2017
Dinosaur Discoveries: Ancient Fossils, New Ideas

January 26-May 14, 2017

New discoveries and technologies reveal how dinosaurs lived, moved and behaved. This exciting exhibition showcases the world of modern paleontology, introducing a dynamic vision of dinosaurs and the scientists who study them. Find out how advanced technologies allow scientists to look at fossils in fresh ways. Examine realistic models and casts, and see dinosaurs walk, run and move their long necks in fantastic computer simulations.

Dinosaur Discoveries: Ancient Fossils, New Ideas is organized by the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in collaboration with California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, The Field Museum, Chicago, Houston Museum of Natural Science, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh.

Dinosaur Family Fun Day

Join us this Saturday, January 28 from 10am-2pm for our first Family Fun Day of 2017.  We'll have crafts and family activities throughout the day in the galleries.  Spencer Lucas will be joining us from the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science to talk about the Dinosaurs of New Mexico.  He will talk at 11am and 1pm with a book signing following his talk.  His book can be purchased in our Museum Store.  Stay at 2pm for a family friendly dinosaur movie!

Spencer Lucas, PH. D., Curator of Paleontology

Spencer G. Lucas received a B. A. from the University of New Mexico (1976) and a M. S. (1979) and Ph. D. (1984) from Yale University. As a paleontologist and stratigrapher, he specializes in the study of late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and early Cenozoic vertebrate fossils and continental deposits, particularly in the American Southwest. Lucas has extensive field experience in the western United States as well as in northern Mexico, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Soviet Georgia and the People's Republic of China. He has published more than 1000 scientific articles, co-edited 14 books and authored three books.
 
Lucas's scientific career began with research on Paleocene-Eocene mammals, particularly from the San Juan Basin, New Mexico. Field research by Lucas and his collaborators in the San Juan Basin during the last 35 years resulted in the collection of thousands of Late Cretaceous, Paleocene and Eocene vertebrate fossils and led to major revisions of the lithostratigraphy and correlation of the Upper Cretaceous-Eocene strata in this region. Diverse research by Lucas on Paleocene-Eocene mammals resulted in major contributions to the taxonomy, evolution and biostratigraphy of several groups, including condylarths, pantodonts, uintatheres, pyrotheres, taeniodonts, tillodonts, entelodonts, brontotheres and rhinocerotoids.
 
Beginning in the 1980s, Lucas worked extensively on nonmarine Triassic stratigraphy and biostratigraphy, especially in the western United States. In the 1990s, this became the basis for developing a global Triassic timescale based on tetrapod evolution that provides a framework for ordering and correlating tetrapod evolution during the Triassic. Lucas has also developed a similar tetrapod-based timescale for the Permian Period, and made diverse contributions to Jurassic, Cretaceous and Cenozoic vertebrate biostratigraphy and biochronology.
 
Lucas also worked on diverse aspects of Triassic biostratigraphy, magnetostratigraphy and correlation in North America, Europe, Asia and South America. He has been a Voting Member of the Subcommission on Triassic Stratigraphy (International Commission on Stratigraphy) since 1992. He has been a corresponding member of both the Permian and the Carboniferous Subcommissions for about a decade.
 
Beginning in 1985, Lucas took an active role in the New Mexico Geological Society (to which he was elected an Honorary Member in 1994). He served as managing editor of the New Mexico Geological Society Guidebooks from 1987 through 1991, has co-organized 11 field conferences of the society and contributed extensively to its guidebooks and other publications.
 
Lucas also worked extensively to develop a fossil collection at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The Museum now boasts a collection of more than 70,000 catalogued fossils, including world class collections of nonmarine Triassic, Cretaceous, Paleocene and Eocene vertebrates, as well as the largest and most significant Permian footprint collection.
 
As an exhibit curator, Lucas has been responsible for most of the scientific content of the three Mesozoic exhibit halls at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science: "Dawn of the Dinosaurs: Triassic New Mexico," "Jurassic: Age of Super Giants," and "Cretaceous: New Mexico's Seacoast."
 
In 1991, Lucas launched the new journal "Bulletin of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science" to publish research on natural history, especially related to New Mexico. As of 2015, 67 separate bulletins have been published in this series, mostly on paleontology, with contributions from hundreds of scientist worldwide.

Western Heritage Museum | 575-492-2678 | themuseum@nmjc.edu |
www.nmjc.edu/museum
1 Thunderbird Circle
New Mexico Junior College
Hobbs, NM 88240