Spencer G. Lucas
U.S. palaeontologist
Spencer George Lucas is an American paleontologist and stratigrapher, and curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. His main areas of study are late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and early Cenozoic vertebrate fossils, stratigraphy, and continental deposits, particularly in the American Southwest. His research has taken him on field trips to northern Mexico, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, and he conducted extensive field and museum research in China in the 1980s and 1990s. He has written more than 500 scientific contributions (about 25-percent are articles in peer-reviewed journals), three books, and has co-edited 14 books.
In 2007, some publications by Lucas and associates at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science came under scrutiny after allegations that information was improperly taken from the unpublished and in-press work of graduate students not on his team. Formal complaints were made to the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs regarding publications on a new genus of aetosaur (a type of armored prehistoric reptile from the Triassic), and a reinterpretation of another aetosaur's armor. In July 2008, the Ethics Committee of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology concluded that the matter could not be resolved in favor of either side.
In 2012, he co-authored a paper describing the world's smallest tetrapod footprints, found at Joggins, Nova Scotia.
Lucas was a master-level chess player (New Mexico state champion in 1973 and 1974). He gave up chess, for the most part, in the mid-1970s to focus on his academic career.
“Spencer G. Lucas” enters the record as u.S. palaeontologist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Spencer, Lucas and palaeontologist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3820304. VIAF identifies the subject as 34146332915018731874. The Library of Congress control number is n80151870. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 2008, 2012 and 1973.
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This entry incorporates text from “Spencer G. Lucas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.