West Bend, WI – Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History will be the featured speaker April 10 in West Bend, WI, discussing the glaciers and how they shaped Wisconsin.
Discover the epic story of ice and trees in Wisconsin and North America, as he unravels our continent’s glacial past and how it has shaped the landscape and vegetation we see today.
Johnson is a geologist and paleobotanist who has been the Sant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History since 2012. His research focuses on fossil plants and the extinction of the dinosaurs, and he has excavated fossils on all continents.
He is known for his scientific articles, popular books, museum exhibitions, documentaries, and collaborations with artists. His recent PBS shows include “Making North America” (2015), “Polar Extremes” (2019), and Ice Age Footprints (2022). His recent books include “Cruisin’ the Fossil Coastline: The Travels of an Artist and a Scientist along the Shores of the Prehistoric Pacific” (2018), “Trees are made of Gas, The Story of Carbon and Climate” (2021), and “Alaska Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and More” (2025).
CLCF’s Nature Series is sponsored by The Ziegler Family Foundation in Memory of R.D. Ziegler.
