John H. Wahlert
Research Associate
Research Interests
My research investigation into the relationships of living and extinct rodents began when I was an undergraduate at Amherst College and wrote an Honors Thesis on the microstructure of incisor enamel in fossil rodents. I shifted my focus to the examination of cranial foramina (holes in the skull) for my Ph.D. thesis. My most influential publication was a portion of my dissertation published by the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, in 1974. In this paper, I built on the work of others to establish a nomenclature for the description of cranial foramina in the most primitive rodents. The latest publication in this series concerns the ear bone of an early fossil rodent from North America.
On a humorous note, an extinct beaver, Palaeocastor wahlerti, was recently described and named by Dr. William Korth.