Meet the paleontologist I: Xiaoming Wang

Dr. Xiaoming Wang is currently a curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He has been at the Natural History Museum since 2002, when he joined the research staff in Los Angeles from his post-doctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History and a teaching position at Long Island University.

After earning a B.S. from Nanjing University, he spent a short time studying at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in Beijing before moving to the United States where he received his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Xiaoming has worked in the Inner Mongolian region of China since 1994, and on the Tibetan Plateau since 1995. His field expeditions placed the little known fossil mammal faunas of the Tibetan Plateau on the map, and continued explorations in western Tibet under his leadership are uncovering additional valuable fossil evidence of a rich and diverse mammal fauna in the plateau region.


Xiaoming has received major research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Chinese National Natural Science Foundation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Geographic Society.

Xiaoming currently lives in the Thousand Oaks area in southern California with his wife Yanping and their son Alex.