Tess Gallagher

Tess is a paleontologist that specializes in the physiology, cellular biology, color patterning, and preservation of fossil skin. Her interests in dinosaurs began when she was a young girl with dinosaur movies and documentaries.

In summer of 2019, a year into her undergraduate studies, Tess volunteered with Elevation Science Institute with her mother on a dinosaur dig. They dug at a site known as Mother's Day, a bone bed of juvenile Diplodocus. It was here that she would uncover fossilized Diplodocus skin, kickstarting her career in paleontology. She published on this skin in her 3rd year of undergraduate studies, describing novel scale patterns.

Tess would go on to her Masters at the University of Bristol in the UK, where she continued her work on Mother's Day Diplodocus skin and discovered that the skin preserved color patterning. This work would be published two years later in Royal Society Open Science, and listed as one of the top 10 dinosaur discoveries in 2025 in Smithsonian Magazine.

Tess currently works at the Edelman Fossil Park and Museum of Rowan University as a Science Communicator, educating guests on the paleontology of cretaceous New Jersey.

Clint A. Boyd

Clint grew up in rural southeastern Wisconsin, spending most of his free time outdoors building a fascination with the natural world. In high school his family began spending part of their summers in eastern Montana where he stumbled upon his first fossil discovery. Now hooked on fossils, he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, double majoring in Geology and Zoology.

His graduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin focused on evaluating the evolutionary relationships of ornithischian dinosaurs, but in the summers he worked for Badlands National Park in South Dakota where he assisted in the collection and preservation of fossils from the Eocene-Oligocene White River Group. Upon his graduation in 2012 he took over the paleontological locality field survey at Badlands National Park for six months before starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. In the latter position he continued research and fieldwork activities at Badlands National Park and assisted with the unpacking and organizing of the Museum of Geology’s paleontological collection into a new facility. He also assisted Dr. Darrin Pagnac with fossil surveys of the Pierre Shale and Niobrara Formations along the Missouri River in South Dakota.

In January 2015 he took over management of the North Dakota Geological Survey’s paleontology program where he focuses on preserving North Dakota’s paleontological resources for future generations and helping people learn more about the prehistory of North Dakota through scientific research and educational outreach.

Stephanie Drumheller

Stephanie grew up in eastern Tennessee. She translated a childhood love of fossils into a profound interest in how those fossils form. She attended the University of Tennessee for her BS in geology, then went to the University of Iowa for her PhD, which focused on modern and fossil crocodylian bite marks.

After receiving her doctorate, she returned to the University of Tennessee to join the teaching faculty in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences since 2013. Her current work focuses on how organisms interact with recent remains, an avenue of research that provides key evidence for the environmental conditions where extinct organisms lived, died, and were buried.

Mindy Householder

Mindy grew up in the Chicagoland area, turning a love of fossils into career as a fossil preparator. She has been preparing fossils for 23 years, working on several notable specimens including "Jane" the Nanotyrannus and a well-preserved nimravid skull from Badlands National Park. In recent years she has focused on preparing the fossilized soft tissues of the exquisitely preserved Edmontosaurus mummy "Dakota." That work also led her to conduct studies on the impacts of different adhesives, consolidants, and solvents on chemical analyses of fossils, which helped develop our current set of best practices usedto study specimens that preserve soft tissues, including dinosaur mummies.