Adele Pentland
Vertebrate Palaeontologist
Australian living in Melbourne
Adele Pentland is a vertebrate palaeontologist and final-year PhD candidate at Curtin University, based at the Western Australian Organic and Isotope Geochemistry Centre. She studies pterosaurs—flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs—and has named Australia’s two most complete pterosaur fossils, Ferrodraco and Haliskia. Her work has featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, BBC, CNN, and other major media outlets. Adele has worked with natural history museums in central western Queensland, like the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History and Kronosaurus Korner to create engaging public displays seen by more than 100,000 visitors. She recently collaborated with Melbourne Museum on ‘Cretaceous Carnivores’, as part of the Victoria the T. rex exhibition (June–Oct 2024). During her career, she has spent more than 30 weeks in the field, helping lead diverse teams comprising museum staff, local landowners and citizen scientists aged 18 to 80 to uncover 100-million-year-old dinosaurs in outback Australia. She has also participated in fieldwork with the Dinosaur Dreaming project, a long-running collaboration between Monash University and Museums Victoria along the Victorian coast. Adele regularly shares her passion for palaeontology through live and pre-recorded television and radio interviews, panel discussions, popular articles and her podcast, Pals in Palaeo. In 2022, she was a scientific consultant for the Australia Post dinosaur stamp series, and she is currently a pro bono consultant for a forthcoming children’s book with CSIRO Publishing. Beyond outreach, she advocates for equity and inclusivity as the Higher Degrees by Research Representative for the Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University. A passionate science communicator and advocate for diversity, Adele hopes her research will inspire the next generation of scientists to uncover—and protect—ancient life, as well as our current biodiversity.
