Tyler Lyson

Who is Tyler Lyson?

Tyler Lyson is the discoverer of the dinosaur fossil Dakota, a fossilized mummified hadrosaur.

Lyson received his bachelor's degree in biology from Swarthmore College in 2006, and received a scholarship to study for his PhD in paleontology at Yale University, where he remains as of 2011.

In 1999, Tyler discovered the Dakota dinosaur specimen while exploring the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota, on his uncle's farm. The find is unique since the fossilized remains include skin and other soft tissues in a non-collapsed state, while a very few other finds have occurred where petrified soft tissue has been preserved, but in a collapsed or crushed state.

Tyler Lyson’s general research interests are focused around his field work in the Late Cretaceous Hell Creek Formation of southwestern North Dakota. He is currently working on two sites from this area: a large population of baenid turtles from a single locality and an exceptionally well-preserved hadrosaur dinosaur. Tyler is interested in the intraspecies variation found in baenid turtles and how this influences the interrelationships of the clade. Ultimately he plans to integrate this research with a more broad scale phylogenetic analysis of the transition of all turtle groups across the K/T boundary to determine the pattern of survival and extinction around this boundary. Tyler is also interested in soft tissue preservation found in dinosaurs. He plans to work on the recently collected hadrosaur dinosaur that has most of its integument preserved to determine how the soft tissue was preserved.