Denver Museum of Nature & Science: What Dinosaurs Mean to Us: A Cultural Anthropologist’s Eye on Paleontology

Join us for an insightful evening with Cultural Anthropologist Elana Shever. Dr. Shever spent more than 5 years shadowing paleontologists at work, joining museum tours, exploring paleontology parks, and trying her hand at fossil excavation and preparation. In this talk, she shares insights into the role that paleontology plays, and the meaning of fossils, in the contemporary United States.

Elana Shever is the author of Making Our Beasts: Paleontology in the United States (University of California Press, 2025), Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012), and an array of journal articles and book chapters in anthropology and science and technology studies. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University. She was Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Advanced Study (2019-20), Research Fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center (2016-2017), and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University (2008-2009). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (2008).

Lecture & Book signing (book must be purchased).