Michael Novacek

Michael J. Novacek is a Curator and Professor of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and Senior Advisor to the Museum’s President. From 1994 to 2021 he served as the Museum’s Senior Vice President and Provost of Science

Awarded a doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Novacek’s studies concern patterns of evolution and relationships among extinct and extant organisms. His interests have ranged from the fossil record to data on DNA sequences. He has led or participated in paleontological expeditions to North American Rocky Mountain region, Baja California, the Andes Mountains of Chile, the Yemen Arab Republic, Argentina, Saharan Africa, Morocco, and the Gobi Desert of Mongolia in search of fossil dinosaurs and mammals. Dr. Novacek is the author of over 200 publications, including monographs and articles in international scientific journals such as Science and Nature, as well as the popular books Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs (1996), Time Traveler (2002) (each a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) as well as Terra: Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystem-and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk (2007). He has also been a contributor to various popular press including Natural History, Scientific American, The Smithsonian, Time magazine, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. His Gobi expeditions and other research have been covered widely by the press and media. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science. He received the Roy Chapman Andrews Society Distinguished Explorer’s Award for 2003 and the Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorer’s Club in 2005 and Honorary Doctorates from Long Island University in 1996 and Beloit College in 2006.