Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Asking questions!!

I hear it about once a week when I walk up to someone at Ashfall and ask if they have any questions about what's in front of them.

"Oh..." they say, either with a laugh or a frown, "I don't even know enough to ask smart questions. It looks really interesting though."

"Sure, you know enough!" I say with an encouraging smile. "All you need is a pointer finger and enough English (or French, for that matter) to say, 'what's that?' In fact, you don't really even need the English or the finger, but it does sort of help!"

They laugh. "OK..."

"Little kids do this to me all the time. Sometimes they all ask at once but point to different things. That's always fun."

Generally at this point, they just seem a lot less tense. And looking around, their eyes fix in on the first thing that they don't immediately recognize. At least half the time, it's this guy.

"OK, so what's that one?"

I'll answer any other question immediately. But with this one, I can't help but want to have a little bit of fun with them. "Well.... what do you think it is?"

After a pause, everyone in the building starts throwing in their opinions.

"...a big frog? Things got big back then, right?"

"No, no, it has a tail...."

"A bird! See the wings?"

"I know it's wrong, but it looks like a pterodactyl..."

Almost no one gets it. "Actually," I say, laughing. "It's a horse."

"WHAT?!"

"Yeah! See how the head and teeth are similar to the larger one next to it? This one is just on his back, and has the ribs all splayed out because a scavenger decided it liked the looks of the stomach contents."

At this point, generally half the people in the crowd believe me. They then tend to ask how the legs got so spread out like that, at which point I explain that at the point that these were buried, the ligaments had partially rotted and things tended to fall apart easier. Hence the other signs of scavenging with minimal damage to the bones.

Everyone's eyes bug out of their heads. Suddenly, asking questions seems a lot less difficult.

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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.