Eric Dewar is Assistant Professor of Biology in his second year at Suffolk. He came to Suffolk after studies in biology and music at Tufts University, geology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and organismic and evolutionary biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Eric is a vertebrate paleontologist who uses the fossil record to study the evolutionary history of mammals from that lived between 75 and 25 million years ago. During this time interval, mammals came out from the shadow of the dinosaurs and radiated into an ecologically diverse group with a worldwide distribution. Eric’s research seeks to describe the ecological structure of fossil mammal communities in order to understand how they weathered several major climate change events.

Eric’s teaching at Suffolk includes a year-long sequence in Anatomy and Physiology for science majors as well as a new course called Humans and the Evolutionary Perspective, which strives to show liberal arts students how science works, and in particular how evolution has shaped humanity’s appearance, behavior, and possible futures.

When not looking at fossil teeth, writing about evolution, or training new squinty anatomists, Eric spends time with his young children Elspeth and Ronan and also plays the trumpet, except during naptime