Christina Byrd is a vertebrate paleontologist with a passion for collections care and digitization. She received her Bachelor’s of Geology from the College of William and Mary where she studied the taphonomy of Miocene whales. She studied the ontogeny of short-necked plesiosaurs for her Master’s of Biology at Marshall University. Following graduation, she collected and prepared fossils along the Panama Canal as part of the Panama Canal Project internship. She began her collections career at the Virginia Museum of Natural History digitizing fossil insects for an NSF-funded project. Three years later, Christina started work at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Kansas. There she served as the Collections Manager for vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology as well as geology. She oversaw two NSF-funded projects and one IMLS-funded project that spanned all three collections. Today, her duties at the MCZ as Curatorial Associate of Vertebrate Paleontology include overseeing the day to day activities of the collection, supervising departmental staff, developing collection policies, working with visiting researchers, approving loan requests, and establishing curation procedures.