Biographical Info

Carrie Levitt-Bussian is a paleontologist and the Paleontology Collections Manager at the Natural History Museum of Utah.  She manages and curates over 50,000 paleontological specimens at NHMU, which include vertebrate, invertebrate, and paleobotanical fossils.  She also spends many weeks out of the summer excavating dinosaurs in Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Her current research is in ceratopsian limb bone histology studying how animals, like triceratops, grew and what their metabolism was like when they were alive.

As part of STEMCAP, Carrie Levitt-Bussian gave a presentation showing dinosaur bones under a microscope and had the students count vascular canals in bone tissues of 75 million-year-old dinosaurs to determine whether that dinosaur was warm-blooded or cold-blooded.