Friday, May 16, 2014

Hit the Road!

At home, there is a museum that I have been volunteering at for years, a collection of shark teeth from my younger days, and lots of connections and supportive friends encouraging me to pursue paleontology. There is a book in the process of being published that I helped with, projects to do, lectures to hear, more books than anyone needs about paleontology, three notebooks of carefully collected articles, and a wall covered with posters from the excursion my dad and I took a couple of years ago across the Midwest.

 But I'm not at home. I'm on the road heading to an internship at a paleontological site called Ashfall Fossil Beds, with a car packed with (mostly) just the basics. Why? Because 95% of everything I have been exposed to at home has been dinosaurs. This isn't because our area is particularly fossiliferous in dinosaurs (or really even in vertebrates for that matter). Actually, our state mostly has Cenozoic sharks with the occasional Triassic reptile further inland, not to mention a ton of invertebrates. There's a lot of great opportunity because of the people (most of whom make it a point to research something dinosaurian through various trips out west) our museum and university  have attracted over the years, but not a lot of variety. Long story short, I am equally curious about mammals, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and other aspects of vertebrate paleontology, and I don't have a huge chance to pursue most of these, mostly because of a patchy fossil record (we were underwater at several points in time, which caused a lot of deposition and erosion. Also, we have trees and grass and buildings that cover what would otherwise be exposures, and other parts of the state are mostly igneous and metamorphic rock.)

 So curiosity won, and instead of going back to study Cretaceous dinosaurs in Utah or Wyoming as I have in the past couple of summers, I thought I'd try to learn a bit about the Miocene.

 Time to hit the road!

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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.