CLCF’s Nature Series sponsored by The Ziegler Family Foundation in Memory of R.D. Ziegler is excited to host Kirk Johnson for his presentation, “The Eternal Battle of Ice and Trees.”
Kirk Johnson is a geologist and paleobotanist who has been the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History since 2012. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he has excavated fossils on all continents. He is known for his scientific articles, popular books, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists. His recent PBS shows include “Making North America” (2015), “Polar Extremes” (2019), and Ice Age Footprints (2022). His recent books include “Cruisin’ the Fossil Coastline: The Travels of an Artist and a Scientist along the Shores of the Prehistoric Pacific” (2018), “Trees are made of Gas, The Story of Carbon and Climate” (2021), and “Alaska Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and More” (2025).
During the last Ice Age, the northeastern half of Wisconsin was covered by several thousand feet of ice. Kirk Johnson has led excavations that uncovered ice age fossils, and he has also excavated fossils from times when there were no ice sheets on Earth. As a paleobotanist, he uses fossil plants to map the advance and retreat of ice sheets and to understand how the modern vegetation of North America came to be. In this talk, he’ll show amazing fossils and explain how they are evidence for both the warm and cold worlds of the past.
