About me

I'd like to think I wear many hats: paleontologist, artist, writer, expert knitter, mediocre crocheter, brutalist architecture super fan, inadvertent source of a Japanese internet phenomenon, and a "worm girl." My research integrates aspects of marine and experimental biology, ichnology, CT analysis, and systematics to address questions not so easily answered in the context of deep time. In particular, I am interested in the origins of our modern, animal-dominated oceans, and the development of ecosystem engineering as seen through the lens of burrowing trace fossils — records of behavior that provide a window into what exactly animals were doing from a time before easily-fossilized hard parts (e.g., teeth, bones, and shells) had evolved. 

I am currently a Deep Time Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Paleobiology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. I received my PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Vanderbilt University in 2024, as well as a master's in the same from Vanderbilt in 2020 and a bachelor's in geology from the College of William & Mary in 2016. I am a research associate of the Western Science Center in Hemet, California, and previously was a Fulbright-funded visiting scientist in the Division of Actuopalaeontology at Senckenberg am Meer in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. I also have extensive collections experience, having worked in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Museum of Natural History Division of Paleontology, the collections of the Waco Mammoth National Monument and Baylor University Mayborn Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Natural History's paleontology collections. Check out my CV here, my ResearchGate profile here, my art here, and my Twitter here. You can contact me at TurkK@si.edu.