Amelia Zietlow

Amelia is originally from Milwaukee, WI, where she grew up attending the city’s trio of natural history institutions – the Public Museum, Milwaukee County Zoo, and the Mitchell Park Conservatory.

She received her B.A. in Biology from Carthage College in Kenosha, WI in the Spring of 2020.
At Carthage, Amelia completed an Honors research thesis on mosasaurs, a group of extinct marine lizards, under the mentorship of Dr. Thomas Carr that later became a sole-authored publication. While at Carthage, Amelia also volunteered in the Dinosaur Discovery Museum’s fossil prep lab, co-founded a Paleontology Club, and, each summer since 2019, she has joined Dr. Carr’s fossil dig program in the Hell Creek Formation of southeastern Montana – first as a student, and since graduation as a volunteer.

Amelia’s dissertation research is an elaboration of the work she began as an undergrad, and as such is centered on mosasaurs. As a group, mosasaurs are incredibly diverse, and her research is focused on sorting out the relationships of different mosasaur species to one another so that they can be effectively compared to their living relatives.

In 2022, Amelia co-founded a paleontology-focused YouTube channel, Skeleton Crew, with four other paleontologists; their goal is to make science communication accessible via video games. In addition to outreach, this group strives to raise money for various issues– in the Summer 2023, they ran a charity livestream that raised over $7,000 for The Trevor Project, and this fall, they are working directly with the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology to raise money for their Futures Award, which funds summer research projects in paleontology for undergraduate students from underrepresented backgrounds.