Thinking About... Deep Time with Hank Woolley ’09

PIECING TOGETHER FRAGMENTS

Paleontology, observes Hank Woolley ’09, is the quest to understand “deep time”—the ancient Earth beyond any timescale comprehensible to the human imagination—through the remarkable history lessons legible in the vast fossil record dispersed across the planet.

“We like to speak in million-year increments,” explains Woolley, a postdoctoral research paleontologist in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and a Research Associate with the Dinosaur Institute of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Sites such as Dinosaur National Monument, spanning northern Colorado and Utah, or the Burgess Shale deposit in the Canadian Rockies expose snapshots of entire epochs of pre-history, allowing researchers to reach back hundreds of millions of years to piece together accounts of what the planet was like before our current Anthropocene era.

Yet, according to Woolley, though fossils holding clues to Earth’s past are incredibly common statistically—even, in places such as Colorado and Utah, incredibly easy to access—very little of that record has been comprehensively analyzed. “Museum collections all over the world possess huge archives of scientific data—preserved fossils and related information such as age and location—that are just waiting for researchers to rediscover, yielding new perspectives on history,” he says.

With a keen interest in probing how the gaps in our understanding of the fossil record influence our views of prehistoric life, Woolley is leading the way among paleontologists attempting to think in deep and innovative ways about fossil collections that already exist—and how they may inform future efforts to paint a more complete picture of our planet’s past.

“We’re in a new ‘golden age’ of paleontology,” says Woolley, “where researchers outside of the traditional powerhouse institutions are making use of growing digital stores of fossil ‘metadata’—information about the rocks in the local environment, geography, climate, similar finds elsewhere in the world—to correlate the different ways we understand the lives of extinct animals and plants.”

BOLG AMONDOL

Woolley’s own research is the perfect example of paleontology’s digital sea change.

In June 2025, he, along with a team of co-authors from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the University of Utah, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and the University of Central Oklahoma, published a paper based on Woolley’s work with lizard bone fragments that had languished in the collection of the Natural History Museum of Utah for 20 years.

When Woolley compared the fragments with existing data, the approximately 75-million-year-old specimens turned out to belong to a new species of Monstersauria, a group of lizards characterized by their large size and distinctive features like pitted armor attached to their skulls and sharp teeth.

“We’re in a new ‘golden age’ of paleontology.”

–Hank Woolley ’09

Woolley dubbed the creature Bolg amondol—meaning “mound-headed Bolg,” referencing a goblin from Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It is a fitting title for a three-foot-long giant whose 100-million-year history runs all the way to today’s smaller, desert-dwelling Gila monsters.

 

The data about Bolg’s newly understood characteristics give scientists improved ability to understand the animal’s evolutionary place on the lizard tree of life, and point to the likelihood that there were many more types of big lizards in the Late Cretaceous. It also begins to suggest that smaller animals must have made the trek alongside dinosaurs between once-connected continents: Bolg’s closest relative hails from the Gobi Desert of Asia.

The discovery and its implications stand as stunning proof of the power of new methods to translate old finds into fresh understanding.

“I try to leverage digitized databases of incomplete fossils, from museums like the Denver Museum of Nature and Science or the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle, to answer some of the bigger-picture questions in the field,” Woolley says. “How complete is our fossil data? What is the quality of that data? How can we draw better-informed conclusions about the Earth’s mass extinctions, biodiversification events, and major evolutionary transitions in ways that we just haven’t been able to do before?”

A FROELICHER CONNECTION

It may be only a coincidence that Woolley’s pedigree as a discoverer ties him deeply to Colorado Academy’s own history; but it is a telling one.

His grandmother, Jane Stuart Righter Woolley, married CA’s founding headmaster, F. Charles Froelicher, in 1966 after Froelicher’s marriage to his first wife, Patricia—with whom he had two children, Franz and Frederica—ended in divorce. With four children from her previous marriage—including Hank’s father Charlie, his uncles Chris and Tom, and his aunt Susannah—”Stuie,” as she was known, made Welborn House into the family’s blended home during the most significant period of change and growth in the school’s history.

Froelicher had been recruited in 1955 to transform a moribund military boarding academy into a progressive college-preparatory school. By the time he and Stuie married, Froelicher had earned CA national renown for its combined emphasis on the liberal arts and experiential education; overnight excursions to the Rocky Mountains and even further afield became a rite of passage that remains a signature of the curriculum today.

Woolley’s father and uncles all attended CA in the early 1970s, at the end of Froelicher’s tenure, and they would have been shaped by many of the same guiding principles that Woolley and his sister, Elsa Woolley Harberg ’11, themselves encountered in the 2000s: Froelicher’s belief in learning through nature, his commitment to the arts and athletics alongside the liberal-arts curriculum, and his insistence on adventure and curiosity as essential ingredients in preparing young students to meet the challenges of a changing world.

CURIOSITY IN AND OUT OF THE CLASSROOM

“There’s a lot from my time at CA that has stayed with me in my career as a paleontologist,” says Woolley.

Surprisingly, that doesn’t include advanced science classes, though museums and fossils were an enduring passion even from a young age. Completing CA’s required biology and chemistry courses by Tenth Grade, Woolley the high schooler was much more intrigued by topics in the liberal arts. “My history and French teachers were hugely important in deciding what I wanted to do in college.”

He went on to earn bachelor’s degrees in Medieval European History and French & Francophone Studies from Bates College in 2013, but over the summer, a chance invitation to a fossil dig at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah permanently altered his path.

“Whether it was backpacking in Canyonlands or backcountry skiing in the Grand Tetons, the trips I took as a CA student stuck with me,” he recalls.

“Being comfortable in nature and learning outside the classroom gave me confidence to take a risk after college. Within the first week on that dig, I knew that I wanted to camp out and find fossils and work at a natural history museum for the rest of my life.”

 

Still, his CA experiences in French and history—not to mention singing under legendary Choral Director Cindy Jordan and playing for several seasons on Varsity teams—played a big part in that realization.

“I had so many amazing teachers and mentors at CA who inspired my curiosity and encouraged me to explore such a wide variety of areas in school,” Woolley says. Laughing about the minor role he played in Oklahoma!, the Upper School musical in his Senior year, he argues, “I got to do it all, and I was supported in doing it all. That made me adaptable; it made me a deeper thinker.”

NOT JUST A 'BUNCH OF ROCKS'

Evolutionary biology and paleontology, Woolley’s main research areas, are fundamentally interdisciplinary. A far-reaching CA education was ideal preparation.

“Most of my PhD in Geology & Vertebrate Paleontology at USC was spent on understanding the relationship between how fossils preserve traits that we can identify and the mostly destructive fossil preservation process. To do that, I had to understand the mechanisms of rock formation, the ways that river sediments bury plants and animals, scientists’ methods for excavating the fossils, and how we sample fragments to understand their characteristics.”

“I knew that I wanted to camp out and find fossils and work at a natural history museum for the rest of my life.”

–Hank Woolley

“It goes far beyond looking at a bunch of rocks,” Woolley makes clear. “And today, I take a really broad interest in the work that researchers are doing in a variety of fields: prehistoric lizard taxonomy, climate-related biodiversity patterns in the fossil record, sedimentology.”

“That’s what’s so interesting about paleontology,” he continues. “It’s a marriage of biology, geology, and many other disciplines, which we can synthesize by examining troves of digital data being assembled by the paleontology community. You get to have these classic Jurassic Park moments of digs and discovery out in the desert, but we’re also building answers to cool, data-driven questions that take the field to places it’s never been before.”

TOMORROW'S DISCOVERERS

Having taught numerous undergraduate courses while completing his doctorate at USC, Woolley has often thought about the future of his field and what today’s students in the sciences need to be ready for it.

“At this moment, schools and universities are struggling with the fundamental question of what they want to deliver for learners,” he observes. “When any large-language model can generate an essay instantly, are we giving kids a specialty, a vocation they can pursue in their first year out of college? Or is it about the ability to think and to process disparate kinds of information in new and unexpected ways, to be curious about a variety of subject areas? Personally, I lean toward the latter.”

He goes on, “It’s definitely an exciting time to think about curriculum; it’s also terrifying.” But the goal of science education hasn’t changed: Inspire students to care just a little bit about what the Earth can teach us.

 

“It’s mind-blowing what you can observe and deduce when you spend enough time examining specimens, going out on a hike, tracing the patterns that we’ve studied for hundreds of years to unlock the planet’s most distant secrets,” Woolley notes. “I think about my own time in Canyonlands with Middle School Science Instructor Jim Milavec, studying geology for the first time in Sixth Grade with Science Instructor Sue Counterman, or my Fifth Grade trip to Crow Canyon. When you can get someone to see that the landscapes all around us, these layers of rock, are actually a history textbook, then that’s a major win.”

The moral of the story, according to Woolley? “The world needs more paleontologists.”