Nick pyenson biography

Nicholas Pyenson is.
Nicholas Pyenson is a paleontologist and the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington.
Nick Pyenson is the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

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MacKids Spotlight: Alex Boersma and Nick Pyenson

The Whale Who Swam Through Time is a sweeping nonfiction picture book explores the 200-year lifespan of a bowhead whale and the changing environment that surrounds her.

Meet the creators, Alex Boersma and Nick Pyenson and go behind the scenes of this gorgeous non-fiction book for kids.

This is one of the most creative approaches we’ve seen to examining human impact on climate change. Where did the idea start?

Alex Boersma: The idea started with Nick’s first book, an adult non-fiction book called Spying on Whales. I did the illustrations for the book, and after it was published, we immediately started talking about doing another project together. We tossed around a lot of ideas for a potential picture book, but kept coming back to the same chapter in Spying on Whales about bowhead whales, and how they can live for over 200 years. Nick described bowheads as “arctic time machines,” a living record of what the arctic was like over the last two centuries, and I just thought that was such a co

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Nick Pyenson Reconstructs Bygone Whale Populations Using Fossils

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleobiologist also studies the evolution of echolocation and special sensory structures in modern whales.

Nick Pyenson first fell in love with natural history museums as a child, growing up in Montreal when his parents would take him to McGill University’s Redpath Museum and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology to learn about the diversity of Earth’s animals, plants, and ecosystems. Seeing the skeletons of large animals, especially those of whales, got him thinking about the stories marine mammals had to tell. In 1998, Pyenson went to Emory University and while he was there started studying whale brains. During a college trip, he and his friends “found a dead dolphin on a beach,” he recalls, “and I thought it was totally fascinating.” The dolphin led Pyenson to question how well the fossil record represents past life. “Understanding pathways of decay and destruction,” he says, “is . . . a big

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Nicholas Pyenson

American paleontologist

Nicholas Pyenson is a paleontologist and the curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. He is the author of numerous popular science works including the book Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth's Most Awesome Creatures.^[1]

Education

Pyenson received a Bachelor's Degree from Emory University. In 2002, Pyenson moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology in 2008, advised by Anthony Barnosky and David R. Lindberg. During this time, he was also working in the University of California Museum of Paleontology.^[2] Pyenson's interest in whales led him to his dissertation topic, "Understanding the paleoecology and evolution of cetaceans in the Eastern North Pacific Ocean during the Neogene."^[3] Following his PhD, Pyenson completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia.^[4]

Research and career

Pyenson's research