Tickets: $0-$5
Online
February 4 at 12:00pm-1:00pm
Join Bay Nature and Samantha Hopkins, researcher and paleontologist for a virtual talk about mountain beavers on Wednesday, February 4 from 12pm - 1pm. The mountain beaver, Aplodontia rufa, is an enigmatic rodent with a very limited geographic range, found only in westernmost North America, ranging down the Cascades and coast ranges of the Northwest and then in isolated populations in the Sierra Nevadas, Point Arena, and Point Reyes. These little-known burrowing mammals have the distinction of being one of the oldest lineages of rodents still alive, having diverged almost 40 million years ago from their relatives. Commonly called the “most primitive living rodent,” mountain beavers are actually a result of a complex history of rapid evolution that has left them quite different from other rodents alive today. This presentation will dive into the evolutionary roots of California’s most venerable rodent lineage to explore where this unusual little creature came from and how it arrived where it is. This talk is free for Bay Nature Members and $5 for Nonmembers.
Meet Your Speaker:
Samantha Hopkins is a professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oregon in Eugene, but she grew up in East Tennessee an hour west of the Great Smoky Mountains. She started college at the University of Tennessee to become a conservation biologist with a passion to save the natural world, and discovered a love of paleontology in a geology course she took out of curiosity. She completed a B.S. in Biology and Geology at UT, then went on to UC Berkeley for her Ph.D., where she studied the evolution and ecology of aplodontiid rodents under Tony Barnosky in the Department of Integrative Biology. After a short postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University, she took a position at the University of Oregon, where she has been since 2007, studying evolution of ecology in rodents and carnivores through the last 30 million years. Outside of work, she enjoys going hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing, as well as reading, making music, and cooking. She has two teenage children, a dog, and two cats.