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Dirck
“Dutch” Barhydt, Jr. ’81 Named Director of
Alumni Relations
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Dirck
“Dutch” Barhydt, Jr. ’81 was recently named Trinity’s new director
of alumni relations. Barhydt, who succeeds Prescott D. Stewart ‘93, will
report directly to Janet Faude, vice president of development and alumni
relations. He will serve as a member of the President's Senior Group with
his primary focus on maintaining and fostering alumni relations.
“Dutch brings a tremendous range of talent to the table. He is a
terrific asset with immense good will and energy,” says Acting President
Ronald Thomas. “I know he will be able to continue the job without missing
a beat.”
Barhydt joined the Trinity College Development Office in January
2001. He came to Trinity from the Chittenden Group of Naugatuck where he
served as vice president and agency principal and was vice president
for
development for the Waterbury Foundation.
Barhydt graduated from Trinity with a degree in English and is
currently pursuing a master’s degree in public policy from the College.
His family has many ties to Trinity—his father, Dirck Barhydt, was a
member of the Class of 1953 and his sister, Caroline Barhydt Francis,
graduated
with the Class of 1984.
Says Barhydt, “I would like to be known as a good steward of
Trinity’s history and a connection to its future. There is great
excitement at the College. Admissions continues to be strong, programs are
being nationally recognized, and we are about to announce a new president.
It’s a wonderful time for alumni to connect and reconnect. There is so
much going on here that I would like to make sure that anyone with a Trinity
connection has the opportunity to share in the excitement that is Trinity
today.”
Barhydt resides in Litchfield, CT, with his wife Hilary and their two
sons, Brooks and Tyler. |
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SUCCEEDING |
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Christian A. Sidor '94 |
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Unearthing
"SuperCroc" and new pieces
of the fossil record |
On
a major expedition in Niger in 2000, paleontologist Christian A. Sidor
’94 unearthed five-foot-long jawbones from an ancient 40-foot
crocodile, the Sarcosuchus imperator. It was an exciting discovery,
particularly since a National Geographic Society film crew was on hand
to obtain footage for a television program on the species, aptly
nicknamed the “SuperCroc.”
But for Sidor, the crocodilian and dinosaur bones were not even the most
interesting part of the four-month expedition led by the University of
Chicago’s renowned dinosaur expert Paul Sereno. In a brief excursion
to an outcropping of rocks believed to be 250 million years old, Sidor
discovered two skulls—one from an amphibian, the other from a large
plant-eating reptile, both of which are older than dinosaurs and new to
science. Sidor has since applied for a National Geographic Society grant
to fund a more extensive search of the site.
What
Sidor is seeking there and elsewhere is new information about therapsids,
which were the dominant land animals between 230 million and 260 million
years ago, well before the dinosaurs came along. Sidor specializes in
the extinct group that documents the transition between reptiles and
mammals.
“Therapsids
eventually gave rise to mammals and I’m interested in how this
happened,” he says. “Because the fossil record preserves
intermediates, we can hypothesize which mammalian features evolved
first, which second, and so forth. We can also see which features
evolved more than once—i.e., in multiple, independent groups—which
might lead us to think which features were adaptive.”
Offering
a prehistoric perspective on physiology
A
biology major at Trinity, Sidor completed his Ph.D. at the University of
Chicago in 2000 and then took a one-year postdoctoral research
fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. In
2001 he joined the faculty of the College of Osteopathic Medicine at the
New York Institute of Technology. Sidor spends the fall on campus
teaching an intensive gross anatomy course that features lectures as
well as long laboratory sessions
with fully fleshed cadavers—a far cry from the dusty fossils in the
field. Sidor notes that he and his colleagues in the department of
anatomy are all paleontologists or paleoanthropologists who can offer
“an evolutionary perspective on why humans are organized in the way
they are.” According to Sidor, this backward- and forward-looking
dynamic is useful in research as well as teaching. After all, he says,
“The shape of the bones has changed but the basic organization
hasn’t changed. So a lot of what I learn in gross anatomy can be
applied back to the fossil record and vice versa.”
Sidor
spends the winter, spring, and summer digging up fossils in remote parts
of the world and publishing his findings in professional journals.
In March he is slated to go to South Africa, where he does much of his
fieldwork in cooperation with Bernard Price Institute at the University
of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. One goal is of course to contribute
to scientific understanding. However, Sidor is also glad to help museums
expand the collections that offer museum-goers insight into the big
picture of vertebrate evolution.
“One
of the big responsibilities of paleontology, in my opinion, is to remind
people that the Earth has been around for a long, long time,
and that humans have been around for only a geological nanosecond,”
Sidor says. Extinctions in the past have profoundly affected what groups
of animals are around today. For example, if therapsids had gone extinct
at the Permo-Triassic mass extinction—like lots of other
animals—then mammals like us would have had no chance of ever
evolving.”
–Leslie Virostek
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