Skye Walker
Field Technician & SciComm Manager
From a very young age, Skye has known that paleontology was for her. Countless trips to the McWane Science Center, hundreds of dinosaur toys, and VHS tapes of The Land Before Time and dinosaur documentaries fueled this passion that never faded away even as an adult. Little did she know that all those dinosaur facts she spouted to her family would lead her down the path to becoming a paleontologist!
When she entered college as a new geology major at Auburn University in 2016, Skye discovered the natural history museum on campus, and decided to volunteer in the paleontology collection. It was there that she discovered the thrill of working in a museum setting and preparing millions-of-years-old fossils, including dinosaurs, mosasaurs, turtles, and more. Throughout her college experience, she had the opportunity for field work all over the United States, digging up everything from sharks, to marine reptiles, to giant ammonites.
Her journey finally led her to join the Elevation Science staff, where she now gets to live her childhood dreams.
RESEARCH
As an undergraduate student, Skye was given an award as a research apprentice, where her research was focused on wood preferences of wood-boring marine worms in Dauphin Island, AL. She later became a research assistant, working on meiofauna food availability in the Bahamas. Later, Skye capped off her undergraduate career with a thesis project on Lophorhothon atopus bone histology, where she determined the age of an individual dinosaur and described its growth rate.
After graduation, Skye worked with Auburn University’s John Fronimos, PhD. on pneumaticity in sauropod vertebrae, particularly those of titanosaurs.
Now, Skye’s research interests focus primarily on Morrison Formation dinosaur biodiversity and paleoecology.
Image by S. Walker
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
One of Skye’s passions in life is sharing dinosaurs and their world with anyone who will listen and educating people of all backgrounds about the natural world. In 2018, she took an elective at Auburn University called “Alabama Dinosaurs”, and loved it so much, she became the teaching assistant the next summer! It was there that she discovered a knack for teaching others, and the experience was instrumental in leading her down the path to science communication.
In 2021, Skye became a paleontology instructor for Sternberg Science Camps, where she was able to put her teaching skills to the test and created a paleontology curriculum for elementary students. Many nights of Open House events in the paleontology collections at the AUMNH honed her skills as a presenter and showed off her passion for fossils. She has presented and taught many paleontology programs to kids of all ages, even for students in England and Germany!
Since 2019, and especially in 2020, Skye decided to turn her social media platforms into tools for science communication. She creates content for social media, sharing and creating posts and videos that are engaging and educational. It is through her experiences, as well as other women in science, that paleontology truly comes to life and becomes accessible to others. She has spoken in classrooms, given formal talks, and has been featured in science-based podcast episodes such as I Know Dino, Riana’s Lens, and The Prehistoric Podcast.
In Her Own Words
“One thing that I know for a fact is that dinosaurs bring people together. If you stand in front of a dinosaur mount in a museum, you can usually look around and see tons of other people there too. They are there for the same reason you are; that childlike curiosity that we never really outgrow. People come from all over, all backgrounds, to see the remains of these amazing creatures that are no longer with us…and it brings everyone together. Paleontology is, and should be, an open door for all. Dinosaurs are that doorway to science and the natural world.”
