Kirk Johnson
Kirk Johnson is Vice President and Chief Curator of the Denver
Museum of Natural & Science. He earned his Ph. D. at Yale University
in 1989 and came to Denver in 1991 to direct the installation of
the museum’s Prehistoric Journey exhibit. He studies fossil plants,
focusing his efforts on the greenhouse Earth of 50 to 100 million
years ago. In 1994, He was startled by the discovery of a 64-millionyear-
old tropical rainforest in Castle Rock, Colorado, and responded
by taking a dozen trips to the Amazon and by launching the Denver
Basin Project, an ongoing effort to interpret the fossils of the bedrock
beneath Denver. Kirk is the author of 4 popular books: “Prehistoric
Journey: A History of Life on Earth” (with Richard Stucky) and
“Ancient Denvers: Scenes from the past 300 million years of the
Colorado Front Range” (with Bob Raynolds); “Gas Trees and Car
Turds: A Kids’ Guide to the Roots of Global Warming” (with Mary
Ann Bonnell); and “Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway: an Epoch Tale of a
Scientist and an Artist on the Ultimate 5,000 Mile Paleo Road Trip”
(with Ray Troll). Kirk loves to work with artists to create accurate
paintings, murals, and dioramas of prehistoric landscapes. Ten of
these paintings of “Ancient Colorado” (by artist Jan Vriesen) can
be seen in the Colorado Convention Center.