Island Africa Project
Erik Seiffert
Erik Seiffert is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University and a member of the Turkana Basin Institute. His primary research is on the origin, early evolution, and interrelationships of placental mammals in Africa, and he has been involved in vertebrate paleontological research in Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa. His current field projects focus on the recovery of Late Cretaceous and Paleogene vertebrates from Egypt and Kenya. General interests include the historical biogeography of Gondwanan vertebrates, phylogenetic reconstruction using diverse forms of data, biogeographic methods, and biochronostratigraphy.
Joseph Sertich
Joseph Sertich is a Ph.D. student and Turkana Basin Fellow in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. His general research interests are focused around his fieldwork in Late Cretaceous sites in Africa and Madagascar. His ongoing fieldwork and research in the Late Cretaceous of Kenya includes the description of a diverse archosaur fauna recovered from northwestern Turkana including titanosaur sauropod, ornithopod, and theropod dinosaurs and crocodylians.
Joseph is interested in hypotheses centering on Gondwanan biogeography and the phylogenetic relationships among Gondwanan archosaurs (dinosaurs and crocodylians) during the Late Cretaceous. His current research includes the description of several new crocodylian taxa from the Cretaceous of Kenya, Madagascar, Egypt, and Tanzania and the systematic and biogeographic relationships among basal mesoeucrocodylians.
In addition to his primary research, Joseph is also involved in projects in the western US including the Early Jurassic Navajo Sandstone and Late Cretaceous Kaiparowits Formation of Utah.
Fredrick Kyalo Manthi
Fredrick Kyalo Manthi is Head of the Department of Palaeontology at the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi and a Post-doctoral Fellow at Stony Brook University. He has worked in many parts of the Turkana Basin, in localities ranging in age from Cretaceous to Pleistocene. His main research interests are in the analysis of Pliocene and Pleistocene micromammals from Africa and their implications for reconstructing paleoenvironments during the course of hominid evolution.
Joe Groenke
Joe is the Director of the Vertebrate Fossil Preparation Laboratory in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University. He regularly prepares vertebrate fossils from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar and from the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene of Mali, and has collected vertebrate fossils in the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar and Kenya.
Hesham Sallam
Hesham Sallam is an Egyptian paleontologist and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Oxford. His current research is focused on mammalian evolution in Africa, with a particular emphasis on the Afro-Arabian radiations of hystricognathous and anomaluroid rodents. He has been involved in vertebrate paleontological fieldwork in the Late Cretaceous and Paleogene of Egypt, Kenya, and Yemen, and geological and invertebrate paleontological work in the Late Cretaceous beds of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
