Dr. J Bret Bennington grew up on Long Island and studied geology as an undergraduate at the University of Rochester in upstate New York. He earned his doctorate in Paleontology from the Department of Geological Sciences at Virginia Tech in 1995 and has been on the faculty of the Department of Geology at Hofstra University since 1993. Dr. Bennington's research has focused on quantifying stability in marine benthic paleocommunities in the fossil record and on integrating paleontological and sedimentological data to understand the development of depositional sequences in both Carboniferous a...