Emeritus Professor
- Email: jftaylor@iup.edu
- Phone: 724-397-2040
Having retired from teaching in 2016, after a third of a century as a faculty member at IUP, John continues to conduct research on trilobites and other fossils collected from rocks of Cambrian and Ordovician age in various areas of the U.S. and Canada. Working primarily at home, parts of which have been renovated to constitute an off-campus paleontological research facility, John works on a daily basis with extensive collections he, his former students, and colleagues from other universities made in projects over the past four decades.
As a biostratigrapher, John’s role in this collaborative research is to identify the fossils recovered and use them to precisely date the rocks that yielded them, refine correlation between rock successions in different regions, and (in some cases) establish whether the rocks were a part of our continent 500 million years ago. As many of the fossils collected have never previously been described, a significant amount of his time is invested in describing new species of trilobites and related groups such as agnostoid arthropods. Major projects that are still ongoing involve Cambro-Ordovician rocks and faunas of the central Appalachians (MD/PA/VA), the American Southwest (NM/TX), central and northern Rocky Mountains (CO/MT/WY), Great Basin (UT/NV), and northernmost Cordilleran region (Alaska and the Yukon).