Meet the Bartenders!

Current Bartenders:

Robert Gay

Rob Gay was born in northern California and knew from a young age that he was going to be a paleontologist. He fell in love early with the rise of the dinosaurs; creatures like Coelophysis and Dilophosaurus. He received a bachelor's degree in biology from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and is currently a MS student at the University of Arizona. He studies the Triassic-Jurassic transition in western North America, and does education outreach in western Colorado. All posts here are his own personal, private opinion unless otherwise stated.

Xavier Jenkins

Xavier Jenkins is an undergraduate student at Arizona State University and became involved with paleontology in southeastern Utah in 2015 participating in a field class led by Rob Gay. Since then he has been a coauthor with Rob on several abstracts and preprints. He also participates in ecological fieldwork studying riparian systems in southern Arizona with ASU. He will be completing his BS and MS both from ASU and hopes to go on to study Triassic microfossils from Utah.

Former Bartenders:

Gary Vecchiarelli

Born and raised in New Jersey, Gary has always wondered what prehistoric beasts roamed his backyard millions of years ago.  His passion for paleontology as a kid fossil fueled him for college where he pursued studies in geology and paleontology.  Gary's current interests are science education and summer fieldwork in the rural Badlands of New Mexico where he hunts Triassic dinosaurs!  Other research interests involve utilizing geographic information systems (GIS) with paleontological fieldwork.

Lisa Buckley

Lisa Buckley is a British Columbia-born paleontologist who is currently one of two vertebrate paleontologists actively researching B.C.’s dinosaurs and their footprints with partner Rich McCrea at the Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre (PRPRC) in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. Lisa was inspired to study paleontology by her great-aunt Molly, a life-long natural history enthusiast who lost no time in teaching a preschool-aged Lisa the proper pronunciation of Diplodocus and Tyrannosaurus. A curator at the PRPRC and a doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta, Lisa spends her snow-free months (they are few) prospecting the wilds of B.C. for new dinosaur bones and tracks, hanging off of ropes to document vertical dinosaur track surfaces, getting devoured by voracious mosquitoes while excavating duck-billed dinosaurs, and harassing (from a distance) local shorebirds as she documents and collects their footprints.