Lecturer
Assistant Director,
   Earth, Life and Time Program
Department of Geology, 
University of Maryland,
College Park, Maryland 20742 USA
Tel: (301) 405-2808
Fax: (301) 314-9661
jmerck@umd.edu

Research Interests
The phylogeny and evolutionary history of the euryapsids, primarily marine reptiles of the Mesozoic Era, including ichthyosaurs, placodonts, and sauropterygians, the empirical testing of cladistic methods of phylogeny reconstruction using digitally simulated phylogenies, and the incorporation of data from CT scans of fossil specimens in the morphological description of fossil taxa.