Our speaker, Kaedan Patrick O’Brien, uses the fossil record and stable isotopes to reconstruct community structures and paleoenvironments. His primary focus is on the Pleistocene grasslands of Kenya, with particular interest in the evolution and ecology of Equidae and Bovidae and on prehistoric migration. He has done field work for these studies in the Turkana and Victoria basins of Kenya. Additionally, Kaedan has done research and field work using Utah caves to understand biogeography of the Intermountain West, and this research is the focus of his talk titled, "What fossils from caves can tell us about alpine Utah's past." Kaedan O’Brien is a Ph.D. Anthropology student at the University of Utah.
