Geoscience

Geoscience research at the Museum focuses on the geological processes that shape landscapes, preserve fossils, and record Earth’s environmental history. Scientists study stratigraphy, volcanism, tectonics, sedimentology, and paleoecology to reconstruct past environments and understand how geological systems evolve over time.

New Mexico’s diverse geology provides a natural laboratory for investigating deep time processes, from volcanic eruptions to shifting river systems. This research supports fossil interpretation and a public understanding of Earth systems, while contributing to regional and global geoscience scholarship.

Paleontology overview

New Mexico has a fossil record that extends back to the late Cambrian, about 500 million years ago. Trace fossils, and plant, invertebrate and vertebrate fossils, are known from most of the geologic time periods preserved in New Mexico’s sedimentary rock record. Museum scientists, research associates, students and volunteers have actively collected fossils in the State from all of those time periods. The collections made are used in public programs, exhibits and for scientific research. The Museum’s collection is the single largest collection of New Mexico fossils and preserves many unique and scientifically significant specimens.

Geoscience collections

The Museum’s Geoscience collections are twofold, minerals/rocks and fossils. The Museum houses a collection of more than 3,200 minerals and rocks that are used in public education and exhibition.

Since its inception in 1983, the Museum has been collecting, storing and interpreting fossils from New Mexico and beyond. To do so, the Museum has established an accredited collection facility; developed and maintained computerized databases of all collection records; and presented published information on the fossils in scientific journals and books.

Mission: To protect and provide access to fossil specimens from private, state and federal lands in New Mexico, the American Southwest, and beyond. The NMMNHS mission explicitly states that the Museum “pursues scientific inquiry, [and] develops focused collections…” The paleontology collections are a three-dimensional library of the history of life in New Mexico.

Nature of the collections: As of 2026, the approximate numbers of catalogued specimens in the paleontology collections are as follows:

• Fossils--more than 107,000 catalogued specimens from more than 14,000 localities
• Fossil casts--more than 5,000 accurate replicas of fossils

The facility also includes a preparation laboratory with accommodations for casting, acid preparation, and micro-preparation procedures as well as room to store and process large specimens such as dinosaurs. In addition, there is an outdoor screenwashing facility for washing and preparation of microfossil specimens, a second building to store screenwash matrix and an 1,800 sq. ft. outbuilding for storage of large specimens awaiting preparation and cataloging. The collection is closely monitored with limited access.

Professional Relationships: The Museum is the official repository for fossils found on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands in New Mexico. The Museum also holds permits allowing it to serve as a repository for BLM and state lands in Arizona. Other permitted collections include U.S. Forest Service land in New Mexico, U. S. Bureau of Reclamation, U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service lands, U.S. Army lands on the White Sands Missile Range, and National Park Service lands.

Accessibility: The Paleontology collections are available to researchers by appointment. Researchers planning to visit the Museum to study its fossil collections or to borrow fossils should contact the Collection Manager, Nicole Volden, at Nicole.Volden@dca.nm.gov

In addition, the Collection Manager and curators conduct prearranged tours for Museum education groups. The public can access the paleontology collections database. (non-sensitive data can be viewed with a free public account). At that site, the collections can be searched by a variety of criteria, including taxonomy (what kind of organism and its relationships with other organisms), geography, stratigraphy (rock unit in which the fossil was found) and chronology (age of the rock unit in which the fossil was found).

Scientific research projects

Museum curators are undertaking active research in paleontology and related geoscience. This research focuses on the evolution of life in the American Southwest, and encompasses diverse studies of Pennsylvanian through Pleistocene ecosystems. Much of this utilizes the fossil collections from New Mexico, and seeks to place these in larger contexts, including regional, national, and global.

• Steven Jasinski is actively undertaking a project looking to refine the stratigraphy of the Late Cretaceous in New Mexico, hoping it will allow them to better understand the important changes occurring to the environment and the associated biota during this time.
• Jasinski is seeking to better understand the ancient biodiversity of New Mexico and surrounding regions, with a particular focus on dinosaurs and their associated biota during the Mesozoic Era.
• Jasinski is also actively working to reconstruct the paleoecology at key intervals in New Mexico’s past, including during the Late Cretaceous when New Mexico was more of a subtropical environment with numerous dinosaurs roaming the landscape before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction occurred.
• Jasinski is also actively working to reconstruct the paleoecology at key intervals in New Mexico’s past, including during the Late Cretaceous when New Mexico was more of a subtropical environment with numerous dinosaurs roaming the landscape before the end-Cretaceous mass extinction occurred.
• Dr. Spencer Lucas is the head of a working group of the Subcommission on Triassic Stratigraphy (part of the International Union of Geological Sciences) to define the beginning of Middle Triassic time on the global geological timescale.
• Lucas is also undertaking research on Early Permian rocks and fossils in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona to arrive at a more precise correlation of these strata to order geological events during the interval between about 300 and 275 million years ago.
• Lucas is studying Carboniferous, Permian and Triassic vertebrate footprints from many localities, particularly in North America and Europe, to arrive at a better understanding of the evolution of amphibians and reptiles between 300 and 200 million years ago.
• Gary Morgan is finishing a project on late Pliocene and early Pleistocene vertebrate faunas from the Mesilla Basin in the Rio Grande Valley in southernmost New Mexico south of Las Cruces.
• Morgan is also involved in field work and research on the biostratigraphy of Miocene mammal faunas from the Española basin in northern New Mexico.
• Morgan is studying small mammals from several fossil cave deposits in southern New Mexico to better understand how late Pleistocene climate change affected the geographic distribution of mammals in New Mexico and the American Southwest.

Research highlights

• Researchers at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science have recently named a new troodontid theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of New Mexico. Not only is this the first troodontid named from the state, but it provides important data for our understanding of these dinosaurs.
• Researchers at the museum have also recently named a new tyrannosaurid from New Mexico closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex. This new dinosaur not only provides vital information about the potential origins of the most famous dinosaur known, but also presents important new data on the evolution of the largest terrestrial predators ever known.