Professor Peter D. Ward

Peter D. Ward, Ph.D. is Professor of Geological Sciences, Professor of Zoology, and Curator of Paleontology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
 
Peter is currently examining the nature of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event with studies in France and Spain involving detailed field work which concentrates on ammonites and bivalves. He is also researching speciation patterns and ecology of the living cephalopods Nautilus and Sepia. A final field of research is examining the stratigraphic history of West Coast Cretaceous basins through detailed biostratigraphy and basin analysis.
 
He authored Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future, Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions, The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why The Ice Age Mammals Disappeared, Time Machines: Scientific Explorations in Deep Time, Life as We Do Not Know It: The NASA Search for (and Synthesis of) Alien Life, Gorgon: The Monsters That Ruled the Planet Before Dinosaurs and How They Died in the Greatest Catastrophe in Earth’s History, and On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions, coauthored Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe and The Life and Death of Planet Earth: How the New Science of Astrobiology Charts the Ultimate Fate of Our World, and edited Global Catastrophes in Earth History: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Impacts, Volcanism, and Mass Mortality.
 
Peter was elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 1984. His 1992 book On Methuselah’s Trail received a “Golden Trilobite Award” from the Paleontological Society as the best popular science book of the year.
 
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