The 29th annual Tate Conference will be held Friday May 30 through Sunday June 1, 2025.  The theme this year:

From mollusks to mosasaurs;

an Exploration of the Cretaceous Marine 

The Tate Field Conference features a day of speakers on Saturday and two days of field trips.  Saturday evening includes a dinner and Keynote Speaker.

This year’s Keynote is Joshua Slattery of University of Wyoming, who will speak about ammonites:

“Reconstructing the Paleobiology, Paleoecology, and Extinction Dynamics of Late Cretaceous
Ammonites: New Insights from the North American Fossil Record”

Speakers

Shaedon Kennedy, University of Wyoming

“Assembling the Queensland titan: A history of MCZ 1285”

Amelia Zietlow, American Museum of Natural History

“Lone Star Lizard Kings: a Gigantic New Mosasaur from Texas”

Anton Wroblewski, University of Wyoming

“How Trace Fossils Make the WIS Bigger, More Complex, and More Interesting”

Melissa Connely, Rochester Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology

“First record of Ichthyosaurs (Reptilia: Ichthyosauria) associated with a diverse vertebrate fauna from the Shell Creek Member of the Thermopolis Shale Formation (Albian) throughout Wyoming”

Kate Marriott, American Museum of Natural History & Brooklyn College Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences

“Adaptive radiation and Bergmann’s Rule in ammonite faunas across the Campanian-Maastrichtian Boundary, James Ross Island and Seymour Island, Antarctica”

Steve Miller, Western Interior Paleontological Society

“Two Decades with the Cretaceous Rocks and Fossils of the Comanche National Grassland”

Keith Berry, Hoehne Re-3 School District

“The Paleogeography of the Western Interior Seaway at the End of the Cretaceous”

Mitch Lukens, KLJ Engineering

“The Life and Times of Mosasaur Belle”

Zach Tenney, University of Wyoming

“Stratigraphy and Paleogeography of the Upper Cretaceous Strata in Central Wyoming”

Oskar Alvarez, American Museum of Natural History

“Gastropods as Potential Tracemakers of Planolites Ichnofossil from Western Interior Seaway in Southern New Mexico”

Registration 

To register click here.  We are not doing online registration, so print the form, fill it out and send it to:

Tate Museum
125 College Drive
Casper, WY 82601

Registration deadline is May 16th.  

The Ramkota Hotel in Casper is the host hotel.  The Keynote Dinner will be held there.  They also have a shuttle available to bring folks to the Casper College campus, as long as there is no airport shuttle at that time.  The number is 307-266-6000.

The Fujita Family Stipend–

Casper College graduate and Tate Museum intern, Lisa Fujita, started this fund in honor of her family to help pay for conference registration for interested Casper College students.  We are accepting donations to keep this fund and its cause going; feel free to donate to this fund on the registration form.  We have also been known to pass the hat during the conference to keep CC students attending.   : )

Field Trips–

Note: Field trips are open to conference attendees only.

The Friday field trip will be to the Sharon Springs Member of the Pierre Shale in eastern Wyoming.  This unit is the main vertebrate fossil producing unit in the Pierre Shale.  We will stop in Lusk and eat dinner on the way home (price of dinner not included in field trip cost).  Therefore we will get back to Casper at about 8PM.

The Sunday field trip will focus on ammonites.  We will be visiting the Redbird section of the Pierre Shale in eastern Wyoming. This area was made famous (in the ammonite world) by Gill and Cobban in their 1966 paper describing the local ammonites and their biozones.  Eighteen ammonite zones were recognized here by Gill and Cobban.  The beds are on the northern end of the Old Woman Anticline and are steeply dipping to the west making these ammonite layers fairly accessible.   This paper was one of the original papers that described ammonite zones in the Western Interior Seaway, and is considered the reference locality for the Pierre Shale in the northern Great Plains.  Dinner in Lusk may be an option… logistics to be worked out.

On our field trips we usually allow personal collecting and/or collecting for your institution, but the Tate Museum and the landowner would have first rights of refusal for any fairly complete or unusual specimens found.

Details to follow.

Field trips require some walking on natural terrain, and are therefore not wheelchair friendly.    

If you have any questions, please contact JP Cavigelli by email or by phone 307-268-3008.

Lodging

We will have blocks of rooms reserved at the Ramkota Hotel for the pre-tax price of $89.  Give them a call to reserve one of these rooms and make sure to tell them you are with the Tate Geological Museum group.  Rooms need to be reserved before May 6th to get this group rate.

The Ramkota offers both airport pickup and shuttles around town, including to the Tate Museum.

Ramkota Hotel and Conference Center – Casper
800 N. Poplar
Casper, WY 82601

Ramkota: (307-266-6000)