The educational videogame we've been working on for three years is out! Finding Lake Chewaucan is now available for Mac & PC via Steam or direct download.  

In this game you are a time-travelling detective. Between your analytical talent and your ability to visit the past, there aren't many mysteries you can't unravel. But this new client's job might be the coldest case you've ever come across.

You’ve been hired to find the story behind a broken fossil bone from the vast sagebrush deserts of Oregon. Hunt for clues, play minigames to solve puzzles and travel through time to learn as much about this ancient animal as you can – where it came from, how it lived, and when and how it died. Because if you can’t figure those things out... well, not only will you not get paid, but a little girl's birthday party is going to be straight up ruined.

Explore the mysteries of Oregon's Great Basin Desert and its ancient past in this educational game focused on over 50 years of scientific research in the Fort Rock Basin. The bones and clues are real – see how they unlock the past for modern scientists and travel there yourself. You’ll play science-informed minigames like the 3D platformer game where you sample tufa rocks for radiocarbon, or the Match 3 game used to identify fossil animals. This free educational game is supported by NSF Award  #2228632.

In early April 2026 we released our playtest version on Steam of the NSF funded educational video game, Finding Lake Chewaucan. People immediately began helpfully finding bugs and weird inconsistencies, which we are actively working on for our final release at the end of Spring Semester!

The Wenas Mammoth was an isolated mammoth (with a bison friend) dug up in the Central Washington area in the 2010's. At the time, Dr. Pat Lubinski and Dr. Megan Walsh also took some pollen samples and some optical stimulated luminescent dates. I spun that together into some frankly very complicated age-depth models and now our paper is out!

My Capstone students were hard at work this semester, culminating in two new digital statistics games to play! The first is Defeat the P, a digital adaptation of a very silly game I used to play in person that involved throwing things at foam bricks in an attempt to alter your p-value on a t-test. Now you can play this using javascript and a digital slingshot! The second is a game that reminds you that it's not just R2 values that matter on linear regressions... their p values do too. Check both of them out in the Games and Interactives link. 

Sometimes you get a concussion and get too mad about a non-peer reviewed PNAS paper and end up writing your first letter to the editor. I didn't quite have the confidence to request inclusion of this figure though it is very accurate to my point.

Emery-Wetherell, M. 2024. "Burrow collapse is not the only explanation for rapid, noncatastrophic preservation of 3D dinosaurs." Letter to the Editor, Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. 122(3) e2423019122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2423019122

The extremely, extremely alpha version of the video game we are making for our NSF award is up and downloadable! You can download it for play on itch.io here. It is a 3D explorer where you learn about the past through minigames that replicate scientific processes. Currently this includes looking around and then identifying some bones using a somewhat hilariously difficult minigame - good luck!