The vertebrate paleontology program at the University of Kansas has, for over a century, sustained a national and international reputation. The reputation of the collection has been based more on intensive use than on sheer size. We now hold over 150,000 cataloged specimens and around 400 publications related to our collections have been published in the last 35 years.

In that same period our staff and students published in the journals Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and 24 other publications including five cover articles. Articles based largely on our research were listed as one of the one hundred most important scientific discoveries of the year on three separate occasions by Discovery Magazine and as featured cover articles in Discovery and Science News (twice). Over nine educational TV programs (NOVA, Paleoworld, etc.) have been based to a large extent on our research program. We were also the first division to begin to computerize our collections and the first to achieve nearly complete coverage of the collection. Our research has also been featured on the cover of the New York Times and in numerous newspapers throughout the United States.

During the past five years the Paleontology Program at the University of Kansas has been listed as one of the top five programs in the country. In the first eighty years we had many distinguished students as undergraduates, but only produced some eight masters and nine PhDs. Since 1970 we have produced twenty masters and twenty-nine PhDs. Eight of these worked on fish; three on amphibians; six on reptiles; three on birds, and twenty-nine on mammals. We also provided most of the material for eight dissertations outside of our immediate program including one in France and another in Canada. In the last ten years, two of our former Curators and one of our former students won the Romer-Simpson medal, the highest honor in vertebrate paleontology. We or our students have conducted fieldwork throughout the United States and in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Germany, Korea, China, and Ethiopia. We are a world class resource in vertebrate paleontology and have unusual breadth in our collections.