FREE EVENT

A local scientist's work is dramatically increasing what we know about Pennsylvania's 129 land snail species. For the Pennsylvania Land Snail Atlas Project, Dr. Timothy Pearce collected 17,472 records of Pennsylvania land snails from modern field work and museum specimens, documenting thousands of new county records. Many minute species are now known to be widespread, although they previously seemed to be rare.

Dr. Pearce serves as assistant curator and head of the section of mollusks at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Dr. Pearce holds a master's degree in snail paleontology at University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in snail ecology at University of Michigan. During a year-long post-doctoral study in Madagascar, he helped find more than 600 undescribed land snail species. During his first curator job at the Delaware Museum, he was awarded that institution's first National Science Foundation grant. His current research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History involves ecological snail studies in the northeastern and northwestern regions of the United States and in Colombia, South America.

Food and drinks will be available for purchase.