I was raised in northwestern Louisiana, in the small town of Plain Dealing, Bossier Parish, which forms part of the region called the Ark-La-Tex. Early life was filled with fun experiences in the pine forests of the rolling hills and in the farm lands of the Red River Valley. My interest in science was a natural, but took a little "discovery." When I took a freshman geology class in college, I reacted with consternation: "Why didn't somebody tell me all this stuff!"
I taught at Centenary College of Louisiana, Lamar University, Texas A&M Commerce, and the Univ. of Colorado at Denver. Presently, I work in software and media development, and have fingers in a few research pies.
Professional and Community Service
Big Thicket Association, Board Member, 2004-2009
President, Golden Triangle Audubon Society, 2006-2007
Vice President, Golden Triangle Audubon Society, 2004-2005
Clean Air and Water, Inc., Board Member, 2004-2006
Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting Host Committee, 2006
Dinosaur Day (a hands-on community science education event), Helped out with Dr. Jim Westgate, Lamar students, local teachers and students, in this fun event held at the Texas Energy Museum, Beaumont, TX; attended by 1000-2000 children and parents each October, 1992-2008.
Chair, Geology Section, Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting, 2003
Vice-Chair, Geology Section, Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting, 2002
Chair, Systematics and Evolution Section, Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting, 1995
Research Interests
Biology
This subject was always a big interest for me, but at the age of 45 I decided to get serious, and while still teaching geology full-time, dove into graduate biology coursework, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It has made me a much more confident thinker. "Modern" human-caused problems have been on my mind for years, and certainly were the focus when teaching Environmental Geography and Geology. It became evident to me that I might be effective at working on these problems, starting with the knowledge I have about the evolution and diversity of Life, and about such things as computer mapping and sedimentary geology, if knowledge about biology, especially field biology, is added to the mix. The coursework helped me learn so much about plants, animals, and ecology. During that period I hiked the units of the Big Thicket, and became especially familiar with the new northern units along the Neches River south of Town Bluff, and the lands to the west along Rush Creek.
Computer Programming and Mapping
I learned to program in C and C++ when working for a computer mapping company during graduate school, having had a little coursework in school (PL/1 and Fortran). That work involved writing software to help geologists map underground rock layers in the effort to find oil and gas deposits, mineral deposits, and water resources. After graduating and beginning my academic career, C and C+ were replaced by Java for programming efforts. Most recently programming work has extended to Python, especially for data manipulation and production of illustrations. For several years I've focused Internet work on Zope and Plone, which are web software systems, both written in Python. In 2009 I made my way into Objective-C and PyObjC for Mac OS X programming, and after that discovered the impact of javascript, node.js, and software systems built for web programming, where I now spend much of my time.
Stratigraphy
Much of my academic research has involved the study of sedimentary rock layers and their correlation using well logs, surface data, and fossils. One project, an offshoot of Master's thesis research, concentrated on mapping underground layers of anhydrite (similar to gypsum) in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Another involved the description of the Glen Rose Formation on outcrop across the central part of Texas, into Oklahoma and Arkansas. The distribution of dinosaur footprints on layers within the Glen Rose Formation and adjacent rock units was a big part of my dissertation, from which several research projects continued. Recent teaching has revitalized an appreciation for knowledge of local geology.
Paleontology
Most of my paleontological work has involved dinosaurs and other vertebrate animals. I have worked on significant excavations of hadrosaur bones from Upper Cretaceous rocks in Chihuahua, Mexico and of sauropod bones from Lower Cretaceous sandstone southwest of Fort Worth. I have also studied fossils from the Cretaceous of southwestern Arkansas, and from the Cretaceous of Colorado. Most recently, collections were made of Cretaceous shark and fish teeth from Arkansas. Several computer programming projects target items for biology and paleontology, notably a simple program called PhylogeneticTree, used for making web pages that show evolutionary history diagrams.
Vertebrate Ichnology
I started studying dinosaur footprints during Master's thesis research in Arkansas, when I found thousands of sauropod dinosaur ("brontosaur") footprints on limestone layers in an active gypsum quarry. Work on fossil footprints became a specialty, and in addition to Texas and adjacent states, this research has taken me across the American West, especially Colorado and Utah, and Mexico. In Mexico I worked as far south as Puebla, south of Mexico City. Most of this ichnological research has concerned the footprints of dinosaurs, but I have also investigated Permian fossil footprints from West Texas, made by pre-dinosaur age land animals.
Personal Interests
Photography
Photography has been an important part of scientific work, and bird and Nature photography, and I've had fun taking photos of my family. My first camera in the early 1980s was a Nikon FE2, with a 50mm f1.8 lens. I remember the big deal a few years later, adding a Nikon F3HP camera, 135mm f2.8, 55mm macro f2.8 with PK13 extension tube, and two Kiron zooms, a 28-85mm and an 80-200mm. I used the Kiron 28-85mm zoom for years and years on the F3, because it was so handy to photograph dinosaur footprints right at my feet, dinosaur trackways, and local setting shots. For aerial photography of dinosaur footprints in Arkansas, a local cropduster pilot took the doors off a Cessna Aerobat, which allowed me to shoot nice aerial photographs, using the Kiron zoom at 28mm and the motor drive on the F3HP firing (It was
cold
that morning!). The 135mm f2.8 lens was great for portraits, and has been a favorite lens. For a while I was doing regular work in the darkroom on black and white photography, doing many prints for dissertation work. With the advent of digital photography, I started out with the feeble offerings of point-and-shoot, but have really enjoyed the Nikon Coolpix series. I had the Coolpixes 950, 990, 4500, P5000, and now P6000, and used them mainly for digiscoping, using a Leica APO Televid 77 spotting scope (broke the first scope in half, but replaced it). My first DSLR was the Nikon D200, which I got with the handy 18-200mm zoom. I have used the D200 for natural history work and for family photography. For a while the D200 was fitted with a GPS, but I learned to also use timecodes and Python programming to sync with GPS data recorded separately. Most recently (2009), I took the plunge on a Canon 5D Mark II camera, and adapted Nikon lenses I had, plus older Minolta, Olympus Zuiko, and Pentax lenses. I now rely mainly on the handy zuikos. The 5D Mark II shoots great stills as well as video, which really got my attention. These lenses go with much equipment to make a tripod and handheld video system. To get started, I "engineered" the better part of shoulder mount and hand-held kits for video, by using pieces-parts from digiscoping rigs, ACE hardware and hobby shop finds, a few bits bought online, and a basic tap-and-die set, augmented by my brother Bob's shop equipment. On the computer software side of video, I've been learning to edit stills and videos using Aperture, Final Cut Pro and related software.
Audio
In the early 2000s, I discovered the NatureRecordists Yahoo discussion list (via the DigiscopingBirds discussion list), and got the Nature recording bug. For a year I made weekly visits to seven specific spots on land along the Neches River in southeast Texas, land that has since become a new unit in the Big Thicket National Preserve. I used a Sony minidisc recorder and a Sennheiser ME67 long shotgun microphone to record for about 15 minutes at each of the seven locations each morning, starting before the crack of dawn and ending mid-morning, and learned bird and frog calls (How easy it is to forget them! Drat!), amassing much recorded audio I have yet to process properly, a typical fate. I've used the same rig here and there to get wonderful audio of birds and natural sounds. More recently I added a newer Sony minidisc recorder and D50 digital recorder, and record directly to the D50 or to the Canon 5D Mark II through a JuicedLink preamp. I still use the Sennheiser ME67, but added a matched pair of Rode NTA-1, and a pair of Audio-Technica 4022 low-noise microphones for stereo recording. Nature recording can be an awe-inspiring as well as depressing experience, with so much human-caused noise pollution, but recording great audio in remaining natural areas helps inspire us to conserve.
Selected Publications
The software titles posted on geojeff.org are substantial efforts, several representing an amount of work and expertise exceeding the work typically done on traditional research projects. See examples in the "software":http://www.geojeff.org/software/ section.
Pittman, J. G., 2005, Illustration Types in Plone, North American Plone Symposium, July, 2005, New Orleans, Louisiana. See the software folder of this website and the plone.org/products area for various software projects related to this presentation.
Pittman, J. G., 2005 (abstract for the Texas Academy of Science meeting March, 2005): A Python Program for Analysis and Plotting of Ecological Data.
Pittman, J. G., G. Bell, and Westgate, J. W., 2003, The Tokio Formatiom at Nashville, Arkansas. Texas Academy of Science 106th Annual Meeting, Nacogdoches, TX, Program and Abs., p. 66.
Pittman, J. G., Bell, G., Cifelli, R., Langston, W., Jr., 2002, Cretaceous Vertebrates of SE Oklahoma, SW Arkansas, and NE Texas, Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Field Trip Guidebook for Annual Meeting.
Pittman, Jeffrey G., and Westgate, J. W., 1999, New Permian Footprint Localities at Twin Buttes Reservoir, San Angelo, Texas, Texas Academy of Science Annual Meeting; abstract.
Pittman, Jeffrey G., and Lockley, M. G., 1994, A review of sauropod dinosaur tracksites of the Gulf of Mexico Basin, in GAIA: Revista de Geociencias de Museu Nacional de Historia Natural, Lisbon, a special volume called "Aspects of Sauropod Paleobiology," p. 95-108.
Lockley, M. G., and Pittman, Jeffrey G., 1994, On the common occurrence of manus-dominated sauropod trackways in Mesozoic carbonates, in GAIA: Revista de Geociencias de Museu Nacional de Historia Natural, Lisbon, a special volume called "Aspects of Sauropod Paleobiology," p. 119-124.
Meyer, Christian A., and Pittman, Jeffrey G., 1994, A comparison between sauropod track-bearing facies of Portugal, Switzerland, and the Gulf of Mexico Basin, USA, in GAIA: Revista de Geociencias de Museu Nacional de Historia Natural, Lisbon, a special volume called "Aspects of Sauropod Paleobiology," p. 125-133.
Pittman, J. G., and D. D. Gillette, 1989. The Briar Site: a new sauropod tracksite in Lower Cretaceous beds of Arkansas, in Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, D. D. Gillette and M. G. Lockley, eds., Cambridge University Press, p. 313-332.
Pittman, J. G., 1989. Stratigraphy, lithology, depositional environment, and track type of dinosaur track-bearing beds of the Gulf Coastal Plain, in Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, D. D. Gillette and M. G. Lockley, eds., Cambridge University Press, p. 313-332.
Pittman, J. G., 1989. Stratigraphy of the Glen Rose Formation of the western Gulf Coastal Plain. Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 247-264.
Farlow, J. O., J. G. Pittman, and J. M. Hawthorne, 1989.
Brontopodus birdi
, Lower Cretaceous sauropod footprints from the U.S. Gulf Coastal Plain, in Dinosaur Tracks and Traces, D. D. Gillette and M. G. Lockley, eds., Cambridge University Press, p. 371-394.
Pittman, J. G., 1985. Correlation of beds within the Ferry Lake Anhydrite of the Gulf Coastal Plain. Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 35, p. 251-260.
Pittman, J. G., 1984. Geology of the De Queen Formation of Arkansas. Gulf Coast Association of Geological Societies Transactions, v. 34, p. 201-209.
