Lance Grande, a renowned paleontologist who has a field museum in Kemmerer, will be holding a Book Talk and Signing on Wednesday, June 28,  at South Lincoln Training and Events Center in Kemmerer. A dessert social will be held at 6:30 p.m., and Grande will begin his talk at 7:00 p.m.

The event is sponsored by the Rotary Club of Kemmerer in cooperation with Fossil Butte National Monument.

Grande will be discussing his latest book, “The Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums.”

Grande is a curator in the paleontology division of The Field Museum in Chicago.

He has been digging, collecting, and researching in the Fossil Basin since 1976

Dave McGinnis is a Kemmerer City Councilman, the Kemmerer Rotary Club secretary, and was the superintendent of Fossil Butte National Monument.

McGinnis worked with Grande at Fossil Butte and helped coordinate this book-signing event.

“Lance was a godsend to the (Fossil Butte) monument,” McGinnis said. “He really helped us develop it in the 80s.”

According to McGinnis, Grande became interested in studying fossils during college when he decided to become an evolutionary biologist.

“Grande’s work has been essential in comparisons between living and fossilized fish,” McGinnis said. “Everyone at the quarries has used one of Grande’s books.”

For a long time, Grande’s most thorough book was “The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time.”

Grande has authored several books and hundreds of scholarly articles. His most recent book about the Fossil Basin area, “The Lost World of Fossil Lake,” is “really the quarry Bible now,” according to McGinnis.

Grande also teaches Stones and Bones, a summer field paleontology course through the Graham School of the University of Chicago.

This field school experience takes high school students from around the world who are interested in studying fossils to the  Green River Formation.

Students spend two weeks digging and camping at Grande’s Wyoming field site. He and his students have collected thousands of fossils over the years.

The 2016 Stones and Bones crew, led by Lance Grande (center) digs for fossils for two weeks while camping near Kemmerer. (COURTESY Photo / Stones & Bones) 

Grande predicted a rare pike fish fossil would be found out at Fossil Butte National Monument, and he was right.

“Fossil collecting is a great interaction between science and commercial business,” McGinnis said.

McGinnis said the event would be interesting for anyone wanting to meet Grande or learn more about the area’s abundant fossil fish.

“Anybody in Kemmerer who has an interest in these fossil fish, or anybody who is a landowner or who takes their kids to go out and collect fossils should come to this event,” McGinnis said. “Grande is really able to summarize these things in an interesting way.”

Grande has amassed the largest collection of Green River fossils, many of which are displayed in the Fossil Butte National Monument Visitors Center and the Field Museum in Chicago. These fossils are also displayed in other museums around the world.

Grande was a U. S. National Park Service consultant and content specialist for the Visitor Center museum at Fossil Butte National Monument, which opened near Kemmerer in July 1990.

He received the James A. Lovell Award from the Planetary Studies Foundation in 2008 for conception and development of the Robert A. Pritzker Center of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum.

In 2009,  Grande received the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence from the Association of American Publishers for the year’s best publication in earth sciences for “Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty in the Mineral World.”

In 2012, Grande received the Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award from the American Society of Ichthyologist and Herpetologists, for an outstanding body of published work in Systematic Ichthyology.

And in 2013, Grande received the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence from The Association of American Publishers for the year’s best publication in earth sciences for “The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Snapshots from Deep Time.”

In 2013, Grande was appointed by the Field Museum of Chicago’s board of trustees as the Museum’s first Distinguished Service Curator.

Grande’s book, “Curators: Behind the Scenes of Natural History Museums,” “steps back to describe the inner workings of institutions devoted to the study of biology, anthropology, geology and human culture,” according to the book synopsis.

The book contains Grande’s story of how he became a curator and why curators are so important in collecting and preserving history. Grande’s book has beautiful color photographs of several exhibits he has been involved with, including the famous T-Rex Sue, on display at the Chicago Field Museum .

Those who would like to purchase copies of “Curators” can order them on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Books will also be sold at the signing.

For more information about this event, contact the Kemmerer Rotary Club or Fossil Butte National Monument.