The Staff and Board of Directors of InfoQuest

Lowell Dingus

President and CEO, Director

Dr. Dingus is a Research Associate in the Department of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is the former Director of the Fossil Hall Renovation at the American Museum of Natural History. The Renovation project, a $47 million undertaking, covers over 60,000 square feet and contains the largest collection of dinosaurs and other fossil vertebrates in the world. The project was completed in 1996. In addition, Dr. Dingus is the President of InfoQuest, a private, non-profit foundation which is devoted to public education and research involving paleontology, geology and technology.

As a dinosaur paleontologist, Dr. Lowell Dingus discovers and collects dinosaur fossils in conjunction with the study of dinosaur extinction. For over 25 years, he has been engaged in scientific publication and conducted a program of geological and paleontological field research that has ranged from the remote Patagonian badlands of Argentina to the harsh Gobi Desert badlands in Mongolia to the Hell Creek and Tullock Formations of the Missouri Breaks in East-central Montana.

In November 1997, Lowell Dingus and Luis Chiappe, the Associate Curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, led an expedition that included a field crew of paleontologists from the AMNH, Yale University, and various museums in Argentina to the inhospitable badlands of Patagonia. The expedition culminated with a remarkable discovery: the first fossilized skin from an unhatched or embryonic dinosaur and the first embryos of the giant sauropod dinosaurs, which represented the first dinosaur embryos found in the Southern Hemisphere. These fossils and the geology of the site provide important new insights about the reproductive behavior, growth, development, and habitat of sauropods. Dingus and Chiappe returned to the site to conduct additional research in March 1999 and came up with another significant discovery: a nearly complete 20-foot-long skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur to be named Aucasaurus-- a previously unknown genus and species of dinosaur. These discoveries served as the focus of The Tiniest Giants, a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in 2000, which Dr. Dingus co-curated.

Over several summers — 1991, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997 and 1998 — Dr. Dingus served as the senior geologist as well as a fossil collector on the Mongolian/American Museum Expeditions. While recollecting localities discovered by their predecessors and prospecting new localities located since, the crews uncovered a rich treasure trove of small carnivorous dinosaur skeletons, fossil lizards, and remains of our early mammalian relatives.

In 1991, he served as Project Director for the Barosaurus and Allosaurus exhibition in the Rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History. The Barosaurus is the largest, free-standing dinosaur mount in the world. Towering fifty feet above the floor of the main entrance hall, a mother Barosaurus defends her baby from an attacking Allosaurus. This skeletal scene represents events that might have occurred about 150 million years ago.

Dr. Dingus was the exhibition coordinator for From The Land of Dragons: An Exhibition of Vertebrate Fossils from China (1987) and The Skull of Apatosaurus: A Case of Mistaken Identity? (1989) both at the American Museum of Natural History. He also served as Scientific Coordinator for Life Through Time, an exhibit concerning evolutionary history at the California Academy of Sciences, as well as a consultant on Dinosaurs Alive, a traveling exhibit for AMNH to be launched in May of 2005.

Dr. Dingus is a frequent lecturer and he has authored or co-authored numerous articles appearing in various scientific publications and in Natural History magazine. He has appeared on all the major network morning shows and national news programs to promote the fossil exhibitions and scientific discoveries in which he has participated.

He is the author or co-author of several books for children: What Color Is That Dinosaur? Questions, Answers, and Mysteries (Millbrook Press, 1994); Searching for Velociraptor (HarperCollins, 1996), which he co-authored with Dr. Mark Norell and which was deemed an Outstanding Scientific Trade Book for Children by the National Science Teachers Association in 1997; A Nest of Dinosaurs: The Story of Oviraptor (Doubleday, 1999), which he also co-authored with Dr. Mark Norell and which was awarded a 2000 Orbis Pictus Recommendation by the National Council of Teachers of English; and The Tiniest Giants, (Doubleday, 1999) which he co-authored with Dr. Luis Chiappe and which received a 1999 Picture Book Recommendation from the Parents' Choice Foundation and was recognized as a Notable Book for Children by Smithsonian Magazine. Discovering Dinosaurs (Knopf, 1995) — which Dingus co-authored with Mark Norell and Eugene Gaffney — received the 1995 Scientific American Young Readers Book Award.

Dingus has also written several adult books for the trade market: The Halls of Dinosaurs (AMNH, 1995) which he co-authored with Mark Norell and Gene Gaffney and Next of Kin: The Fossil Halls at the American Museum of Natural History (Rizzoli, 1996); The Mistaken Extinction (W. H. Freeman, 1997), which he co-authored with Dr. Timothy Rowe; and, Walking on Eggs: The Discovery of Eggs and Embryos of Giant Dinosaurs in Patagonia which he co-authored with Dr. Luis Chiappe (Scribners, 2001). His latest book is entitled Hell Creek, Montana, was published by St. Matin's Press in July 2004.