Scientific storyteller Tim Flannery to visit

Tim Flannery, scienstist, popular author and currently the visiting professor of Australian studies at Harvard University, will give a colloquium – “Did We All Come From Oz? The Significance of Apparent Placental Mammal Fossils From the Early Cretaceous of Southeastern Australia” – on campus Friday, March 19 at 3:30 p.m. in Room 168 Noland Hall, 250 N. Mills St.

Flannery has camped among cannibals and lived to tell the tale. He’s the discoverer of 20 new species of animals, a scientist with a bent for controversy, and a popular author to boot. Described as the “Australian Steven Jay Gould,” Flannery is the author of “The Future Eaters,” a highly controversial book about the human impact on Australia from prehistoric time onward.

Curator of mammals at the Australian Museum in Sydney, Flannery is an authority on the fauna of New Guinea and Australia, an expertise reflected in three important scholarly books on Australasian mammals. A world-class storyteller, Flannery draws on two decades of field studies in a corner of the world where “energy and danger run high” to portray not only the fauna of New Guinea and Australia, but the people who inhabit these places as well.