Prof, students work on Virtual Field Trip about dinosaur research for high schoolers

Seemingly all students love dinosaurs but few, at least in high school, have access to the sciences needed to study them.

This summer, a Rowan University paleontologist and two students, working with students and faculty from Villanova University, travelled to the western badlands of Montana and Wyoming to help create a Virtual Field Trip (VFT) so students everywhere can learn about the sciences involved in dinosaur research.

Krystin Voegele, Ph.D., then an assistant professor of Geology in the School of Earth & Environment, said she and students Chris Rogoff and Peter “Trey” Shelton wanted to help make the VFT about hunting for dinosaurs because the creation of a free online tool speaks to a great need in K-12 education: a lack of resources in the geosciences.

The thrill of the work aside, Voegele said by spending a few weeks in the dinosaur boneyards she, her students, and her Villanova colleagues are helping to create educational materials that generations of high school students can use.

“The goal was to provide resources on the STEM disciplines, using paleontology and the study of dinosaurs as a hook for high school students,” said Voegele, who has since accepted a teaching and research position at the University of North Dakota.

The trip involved fieldwork in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin just across the Montana border where researchers deployed professional search, discovery, excavation and removal techniques for a variety of dinosaur bones.

She said the three-year project will be available for free on the American Geosciences Institute’s website, most likely in the summer of 2026.

“We’re going back for two more years. Each year has a field season and the goal is to build out different parts of the VFT each year,” she said.

Rogoff, a senior geology major with a focus on paleontology, said he couldn’t miss the opportunity to search for dinosaur fossils in an area known to be teeming with them.

“My dream is to be a paleontologist,” he said. “For paleontologists, a lot of the fun is being out in the field looking for fossils.”

Rogoff said a migration of sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus, took place across their search site more than 100 million years ago and scientists have proof of the migration from the field of bones left behind. Many of those bones have been partially unearthed by erosion, Rogoff said.

“They basically all died due to a hypothesized drought before the asteroid hit,” he said, referencing the calamitous strike 66 million years ago that killed off most of the dinosaurs and other life on Earth.

Shelton, a junior geology major who’s also focusing on paleontology, said there are technical aspects of searching for, finding and excavating ancient bones that can only be learned in the field. The search area they worked in is owned by the Bureau of Land Management and can only be accessed with permits.

He said many of the fossils at the site were from marine animals, just as they are in Rowan’s Jean & Ric Edelman Fossil Park in Mantua Township. Rowan, in partnership with the Edelmans, is currently building a nearly $80 million museum at the site.

“There were lots of belemnites, which were sort of like squid, and Gryphaea, aka Devil's Toenail, a bivalve like a clam or oyster,” Shelton said.

As for the VFT, Shelton expects it to have great potential to reach students, most of whom wouldn’t otherwise have a chance to search for fossils out west, at least not while still in high school.

“Sciences like geology enrich how we view the world,” he said. “I think everyone should be able to have that.”

Photo credits: Shelton excavates in bonebed (Trey Shelton); Members of VFT crew out west (Virginia Schutte)