Waco Mammoth National Monument Hires Its First Paleontologist

Paleontologist Lindsey Yann with two members of the 65,000-year-old nursery herd. NPS.

Lindsey Yann became the first paleontologist at Waco Mammoth National Monument, Texas, in 2020 — new to the Park Service, and, after her first 6 weeks, in awe of the fossils.

Her path

• Early love: raised in southwestern Virginia, she camped and backpacked in the Great Smoky Mountains every summer. As a teenager she helped the Virginia Museum of Natural History dig whales, dolphins and fishes from the middle Miocene Calvert Formation and small reptiles, insects and plants from the Triassic Cow Branch Formation on the Virginia–North Carolina border.
• Degrees: a dual B.S. in Geosciences and Biological Sciences from Virginia Tech; an M.S. at Louisiana State University, using rare earth elements to trace where fossils in the Tunica Hills creeks came from; and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt (2014), using stable isotopes in mammal teeth to reconstruct Pleistocene climates and how animal communities responded — including an aridity index for camelids that separates the effects of temperature and precipitation.
• The Park Service: a GeoCorps internship at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, preparing education materials and packing specimens for the new visitor center.
• Dinosaurs, then back: five years as a senior research assistant at Oklahoma State University's Center for Health Sciences, with fieldwork in the Morrison Formation of Oklahoma and the Cretaceous Two Medicine Formation of Montana — but Pleistocene animals were her first love.

The job ahead

• A partnership park: established in July 2015, the monument is run by the National Park Service, the City of Waco, the Waco Mammoth Foundation and Baylor University. Yann will work with all four to build its paleontology program.
• Room to explore: the federal government owns just under five acres, but the city owns 100+ more still to investigate — 105+ acres in all to survey and plan for. Fossils are already washing out of small ravines, including what may be another camel.

Sources

Based on "First Paleontologist Hired at Waco Mammoth National Monument," by Lindsey Yann, Park Paleontology News (Spring 2020), National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. A family snapshot is left out. More: Waco Mammoth National Monument · NPS fossils and paleontology.