James Matthew Clark

James Matthew Clark (* 1956 ) is an American paleontologist who studies dinosaurs and fossil crocodiles .

Clark graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in 1978 and a master's degree in 1985, and he received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1986 (on cladistic phylogeny of crocodylomorpha ). As a post-doctoral student , he was at the University of California, Davis from 1987 to 1989, at the National Museum of Natural History from 1989 to 1991 and at the American Museum of Natural History from 1991 to 1994 , in whose expeditions to the Gobi Desert he was involved from 1991 ( also as co-organizer). In addition to North America (Nevada, Arizona, Montana), he also undertook field research in Mexico (where he and R. Cifelli discovered the Huizachal Canyon Lower Jurassic site in the Sierra Madre Oriental in 1982 and found, among other things, a primitive pterosaur), Venezuela, Yemen and Vietnam and finally from 2000 in the Jura of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China.

In his field research in Mongolia and China, he is primarily interested in the early development of theropods and birds. In Mongolia he and Mark Norell and others made sensational finds ( Mononykus , Oviraptoren and their bird-like breeding behavior, Shuvuuia and others).

In Nevada he dug up thalattosauria from the Triassic (with Hans-Dieter Sues and Nick Hotton).

He is the Ronald Weintraub Professor of Biology at George Washington University .

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