Name Martin Lockley Role Educator | Parents Ronald Lockley | |
 | ||
Books Tracking dinosaurs, How Humanity Came Int, Dinosaur Tracks and Other Fos, The eternal trail, Dinosaur Tracks: And Othe | ||
Education University of Birmingham | ||
Martin Lockley (born 1950) is a Welsh palaeontologist. He was educated in the United Kingdom where he obtained degrees (BSc and PhD) and post-doctoral experience in Geology in the 1970s. Since 1980 he has been a professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, (UCD) and is currently a Professor Emeritus. He is best known for work on fossil footprints and was former director of the Dinosaur Tracks Museum at UCD. He is an Associate Curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History and Research Associate at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. During his years at UCD he earned a BA in 2007 in Spanish with a minor in Religious Studies, became a member of the Scientific and Medical Network and taught and published on the evolution of consciousness.
Contents
Early life
Lockley was born in the Channel Islands in 1950 and grew up in Orielton, a large country house in South Wales, now the Orielton Field Studies Centre. His interest in natural history grew under the influence of his father, Ronald M. Lockley (1903–2000) who became well known as a Welsh naturalist (ornithologist) and author of more than 50 books.
Lockley moved to England in the early 1960s where he attended Leighton Park School and twice (1966, 1968) won the All England Schools championship in shot put. Later after earning a BSc in Geology from the Queens University Belfast, he embarked on a career in palaeontology under the guidance of his mentor Sir Alwyn Williams FRS obtaining a PhD from the University of Birmingham (1977). As a graduate student and post-doctoral researcher at Glasgow University (1977–1980) he studied Welsh Ordovician paleoecology and represented Wales in athletics.
In 1980 Lockley took a position as Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of Colorado Denver, and began his field oriented research on fossil footprints. Before then, few people had studied fossil footprints in the Rocky Mountain region, despite what turned out to be an abundance of important sites, including the Purgatoire Dinosaur Tracksite site in southeast Colorado. As the fossil footprint collections grew, Lockley created the Dinosaur Tracks Museum acting as Curator/Director there from 1966 until 2012. During this time he became a founding member of the Museum of Western Colorado with Dinosaur Ridge near Denver. He built up the fossil footprint collection to include more than 2,700 specimens representing Colorado, Utah.
Career
Lockley is (2014) researching fossil trackways in Colorado and western North America, China, South Korea, Spain and the UK. He has published results of fossil footprint research in Portugal, Germany, France, Bolivia, Japan, Thailand and East Africa. He has been involved in efforts to create Geoparks, Unesco World Heritage sites and other protected areas in North America, Europe and East Asia.
Awards and recognition
Awards and recognition include American Association of Petroleum Geologists Distinguished Lecturer (1991–1992) and Harrison Schmitt Award (2013), Rocky Mountain Association of Geologists Distinguished Public Service and Journalism Awards, and The University of Colorado Chancellor's Lecturer Award, Researcher of the Year and Colorado Community Service Awards.