World-renowned paleontologist Jack Horner, author of How to Build a Dinosaur, will discuss how he and his colleagues are building the technology to create a real dinosaur at a lecture that is part of UGA’s annual Darwin Days celebration.
Horner, who advised Steven Spielberg on Jurassic Park and is Regents Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University, will speak at 4 p.m. on Feb. 6 in Room 102 of the Miller Learning Center. His lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a reception in which copies of How to Build a Dinosaur will be available for signing.
Other Darwin Days events, also free and open to the public, include lectures on how to build a cell, how scientists find fossils and a look at human evolution from the perspective of body lice.
The first Darwin Day celebration at UGA was held Feb. 12, 1909, to mark the centennial of the birth of the man whose theory of evolution through natural selection is the foundation of modern biology. The event at UGA became an annual tradition spanning several days in 2009, and other Darwin Day events are held annually on or around Feb. 12 across the globe.
“What we try to achieve during Darwin Days is not just have scientists talking to other scientists, but to have scientists who study evolution share the importance of that work with the public,” said Mark Farmer, professor and chair of biological sciences in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, “because evolution does affect each and every one of us—from antibiotic resistant bacteria to understanding how our genes influence who we are—whether we’re scientists studying it or not.”
Other Darwin Days lectures will be presented by Wallace Marshall, Feb. 7 and 8, University of California, San Francisco; David Reed, Feb. 8, Florida Museum of Natural History and the University of Florida; Steve Holland, Feb, 8, UGA; and Michael Habib, Feb. 9, Chatham University.
The events are co-sponsored by division of biological sciences in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the Willson Center for the Humanities and Arts, along with the Odum School of Ecology; the Georgia Museum of Natural History; the Franklin College departments of anthropology, cellular biology, genetics and geology, and the faculty of developmental biology; and, within the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the departments of entomology and poultry science.
More information about these events is online at http://darwinday.uga.edu/.
