I love nature I was collecting insects
because I thought that was just
wonderful then I started collecting
leaves I didn’t think too much about
dinosaurs and fossils but I loved nature
and I love biology on the side in the
summer out of the classroom and when the
time came and the time was right I made
it to college and I meant the college as
an artist and when the time was right
I started to understand that this
biology stuff was pretty interesting and
evolution was pretty interesting and
fossils was pretty interesting I wasn’t
sure what I wanted to be artists
paleontologists they didn’t know but one
day I walked into a museum in New York
and it all came before my eyes I saw
that the adventure that I used to love
so much as a kid over the summer
imagining myself going down to
Mississippi River traveling the art that
I so much loved in school and the
science of discovery of discovery of old
things and bringing their lives back was
what I wanted to do and I wanted to do
it now and I became a paleontologist at
that very moment and I’ll never forget
that first trip you know I was a
greenhorn at this University and as an
explorer the greatest places to explore
are places you haven’t been the greatest
places to explore are places where
enough discovery hasn’t happened and as
a person you got to convince somebody of
the impossible that you’re going to go
to someplace you’ve never been and
you’re gonna do something that no one
has ever done and considers unlikely but
they got to trust you that you’re going
to do it and so they gave me a small
amount of money I went down to Argentina
ran into some Argentinian students and
formed a team and we were given no
chance even by the Argentinians were
given no chance we all thought we could
do something they thought it was going
to be a hopeless disaster we didn’t even
speak each other’s language
I was just learning Spanish and we went
out and we found 300 fossils a couple of
those included the first skull and
skeleton of a nerdy dinosaur and that
was the beginning of a long series of
discoveries but that’s really what
discovery is about it’s about doing
things that other people think are
unlikely it’s about going places where
people haven’t been there’s usually some
reason for it
the reason is usually that it’s hard to
exist out there it’s hard to do those
things there’s the hard things that
haven’t been done but if you really
enjoyed venture and you enjoy camping
out of the Stars and you enjoy meeting
new people and discovering things that
no one has ever seen
then that’s the life for you
paleontology it’s a great discipline
I’ll never forget how it happened we had
found a lot of bones but we hadn’t found
a complete skull or skeleton of an early
dinosaur there was one area of the
valley that we were slowly marching our
way down that we had just about to leave
and I didn’t see any footprints I didn’t
seen anybody that had seen this little
corner and it bugged me and as we march
down the valley we were now half a mile
away from this place and I said on a
Sunday it was our day off I said last
night
it’s the Bermuda Triangle back day I
feel there’s something in it I’ll take
anybody that wants to take a good part
of their day off and come with me but
you know I got to go back I can’t I
can’t sleep at night we drove back to
this area I put down my my bag and I
walked up we’d all just burst
I walked up
and I saw this fossil on an edge of rock
and I walked up to it and I could see in
front of my eyes the skull of the surly
dinosaur the first one that had ever
been found
diving into the rock there was a piece
of its neck was just out of place I
probably would have washed away the next
year I rolled it back into place and we
dated those rocks the animals rocks are
a quarter of a billion years old 228
million years old this fossil had
existed and was about to wash away and I
come up and find it and I came out of
Yale and people thought either I fell
over and died or I had found it and that
was a glorious moment and we all grouped
around I walked away actually while the
people were gathering around the fossil
and just in utter amazement because it
could have been found in many other ways
could have had the tail sticking out but
you’re gonna the way it was preserved
was just so glorious it was such a
moment to remember that I just sat down
and cried and they all came around and
they had said they said they’d never
seen a scientist react like that to a
fossil but at that point you realized
that that was was the beginning of a
career it was the beginning of something
that was going to be truly great and it
was just a great moment I’ll never
forget it
we found
and interesting site in western China
that we’re going to be describing in a
few months it was a site where we had
not one not ten but more than 20
individuals of an ornithomimus dinosaur
anism avid dinosaur they look like
ostriches piled up on top of each other
as we dug in further and further more
and more of them now the super
interesting thing about these dinosaurs
is that they seem to be buried all at
once for that story we had to read it
carefully at the mud that’s around them
they were trapped in mud suddenly it
seems as though we found the first
population of dinosaurs
what’s even greater is that when we age
them we found that they were no
hatchlings and no adults they were all
teenagers there were all six seven eight
years old forming a herd that wouldn’t
you know it without any adult
supervision got stuck in the margins of
a lake and gave us really the first
population of dinosaurs the first
natural herd of dinosaurs that has ever
been recovered but snapshots like this
from the fossil record I would help us
understand the biology of dinosaurs we
understand now that well we should have
predicted that we’d find herds of
teenagers because dinosaurs are very
much like birds but they they don’t grow
in one year like birds they grow fast
but it takes them five six seven years
so while momma and daddy dinosaur are
sitting on the nest once or twice a year
where are all the four and five year
olds and the six year olds and seven
year olds well we think we found the
smoking gun
they were probably roaming around in
herds unchaperoned and looking for
trouble
I think dinosaurs and fossils in general
but dinosaurs more than anything they
are the icons for the past we live in
the present everything we see in sense
is today and yesterday and it takes us
on a time travel time trip back in time
to a world that we can only imagine
there’s nothing more that kids like to
do that it’s a human human basic human
talent which is imagination to imagine
past worlds dinosaurs do that more than
anything they have personalities they
have habits they have lives and and kids
love to imagine a life far gone in the
past where animals bizarre animals
fearsome and an imaginary existed and
you know and as a scientist I’m lost in
that world and I’m just trying to bring
it back and I’m wandering around
discovering new things but but kids love
that too it’s a basic human human
occupation imagination
I like to bring everybody on board and
especially kids and and the effect is
that they tell other kids and those kids
tell other kids I was there and Baba and
an excitement has generated over
discovery I like to to have that that
inclusiveness at the time you really
announced the big findings because it
then has a relevance for society and we
we ultimately need rational thought we
need science literacy if we’re going to
survive as a species more so now than
ever before it was a Sputnik in the
1950s that generated sort of an
emergency feeling about science and how
we need to train more scientists and
we’ve lulled ourselves into into
complacency in the years since that time
and and what’s really really is now is
is our changing world and we’ve got to
have the engineers and the scientists in
the generation to come if we are
actually going to survive as a species
we need them and so when we have a
science discovery a dinosaur a molecule
I don’t care it can be anything we
really need to bring it to the public in
a bigger way than we we have been doing
because I thought that was just
wonderful then I started collecting
leaves I didn’t think too much about
dinosaurs and fossils but I loved nature
and I love biology on the side in the
summer out of the classroom and when the
time came and the time was right I made
it to college and I meant the college as
an artist and when the time was right
I started to understand that this
biology stuff was pretty interesting and
evolution was pretty interesting and
fossils was pretty interesting I wasn’t
sure what I wanted to be artists
paleontologists they didn’t know but one
day I walked into a museum in New York
and it all came before my eyes I saw
that the adventure that I used to love
so much as a kid over the summer
imagining myself going down to
Mississippi River traveling the art that
I so much loved in school and the
science of discovery of discovery of old
things and bringing their lives back was
what I wanted to do and I wanted to do
it now and I became a paleontologist at
that very moment and I’ll never forget
that first trip you know I was a
greenhorn at this University and as an
explorer the greatest places to explore
are places you haven’t been the greatest
places to explore are places where
enough discovery hasn’t happened and as
a person you got to convince somebody of
the impossible that you’re going to go
to someplace you’ve never been and
you’re gonna do something that no one
has ever done and considers unlikely but
they got to trust you that you’re going
to do it and so they gave me a small
amount of money I went down to Argentina
ran into some Argentinian students and
formed a team and we were given no
chance even by the Argentinians were
given no chance we all thought we could
do something they thought it was going
to be a hopeless disaster we didn’t even
speak each other’s language
I was just learning Spanish and we went
out and we found 300 fossils a couple of
those included the first skull and
skeleton of a nerdy dinosaur and that
was the beginning of a long series of
discoveries but that’s really what
discovery is about it’s about doing
things that other people think are
unlikely it’s about going places where
people haven’t been there’s usually some
reason for it
the reason is usually that it’s hard to
exist out there it’s hard to do those
things there’s the hard things that
haven’t been done but if you really
enjoyed venture and you enjoy camping
out of the Stars and you enjoy meeting
new people and discovering things that
no one has ever seen
then that’s the life for you
paleontology it’s a great discipline
I’ll never forget how it happened we had
found a lot of bones but we hadn’t found
a complete skull or skeleton of an early
dinosaur there was one area of the
valley that we were slowly marching our
way down that we had just about to leave
and I didn’t see any footprints I didn’t
seen anybody that had seen this little
corner and it bugged me and as we march
down the valley we were now half a mile
away from this place and I said on a
Sunday it was our day off I said last
night
it’s the Bermuda Triangle back day I
feel there’s something in it I’ll take
anybody that wants to take a good part
of their day off and come with me but
you know I got to go back I can’t I
can’t sleep at night we drove back to
this area I put down my my bag and I
walked up we’d all just burst
I walked up
and I saw this fossil on an edge of rock
and I walked up to it and I could see in
front of my eyes the skull of the surly
dinosaur the first one that had ever
been found
diving into the rock there was a piece
of its neck was just out of place I
probably would have washed away the next
year I rolled it back into place and we
dated those rocks the animals rocks are
a quarter of a billion years old 228
million years old this fossil had
existed and was about to wash away and I
come up and find it and I came out of
Yale and people thought either I fell
over and died or I had found it and that
was a glorious moment and we all grouped
around I walked away actually while the
people were gathering around the fossil
and just in utter amazement because it
could have been found in many other ways
could have had the tail sticking out but
you’re gonna the way it was preserved
was just so glorious it was such a
moment to remember that I just sat down
and cried and they all came around and
they had said they said they’d never
seen a scientist react like that to a
fossil but at that point you realized
that that was was the beginning of a
career it was the beginning of something
that was going to be truly great and it
was just a great moment I’ll never
forget it
we found
and interesting site in western China
that we’re going to be describing in a
few months it was a site where we had
not one not ten but more than 20
individuals of an ornithomimus dinosaur
anism avid dinosaur they look like
ostriches piled up on top of each other
as we dug in further and further more
and more of them now the super
interesting thing about these dinosaurs
is that they seem to be buried all at
once for that story we had to read it
carefully at the mud that’s around them
they were trapped in mud suddenly it
seems as though we found the first
population of dinosaurs
what’s even greater is that when we age
them we found that they were no
hatchlings and no adults they were all
teenagers there were all six seven eight
years old forming a herd that wouldn’t
you know it without any adult
supervision got stuck in the margins of
a lake and gave us really the first
population of dinosaurs the first
natural herd of dinosaurs that has ever
been recovered but snapshots like this
from the fossil record I would help us
understand the biology of dinosaurs we
understand now that well we should have
predicted that we’d find herds of
teenagers because dinosaurs are very
much like birds but they they don’t grow
in one year like birds they grow fast
but it takes them five six seven years
so while momma and daddy dinosaur are
sitting on the nest once or twice a year
where are all the four and five year
olds and the six year olds and seven
year olds well we think we found the
smoking gun
they were probably roaming around in
herds unchaperoned and looking for
trouble
I think dinosaurs and fossils in general
but dinosaurs more than anything they
are the icons for the past we live in
the present everything we see in sense
is today and yesterday and it takes us
on a time travel time trip back in time
to a world that we can only imagine
there’s nothing more that kids like to
do that it’s a human human basic human
talent which is imagination to imagine
past worlds dinosaurs do that more than
anything they have personalities they
have habits they have lives and and kids
love to imagine a life far gone in the
past where animals bizarre animals
fearsome and an imaginary existed and
you know and as a scientist I’m lost in
that world and I’m just trying to bring
it back and I’m wandering around
discovering new things but but kids love
that too it’s a basic human human
occupation imagination
I like to bring everybody on board and
especially kids and and the effect is
that they tell other kids and those kids
tell other kids I was there and Baba and
an excitement has generated over
discovery I like to to have that that
inclusiveness at the time you really
announced the big findings because it
then has a relevance for society and we
we ultimately need rational thought we
need science literacy if we’re going to
survive as a species more so now than
ever before it was a Sputnik in the
1950s that generated sort of an
emergency feeling about science and how
we need to train more scientists and
we’ve lulled ourselves into into
complacency in the years since that time
and and what’s really really is now is
is our changing world and we’ve got to
have the engineers and the scientists in
the generation to come if we are
actually going to survive as a species
we need them and so when we have a
science discovery a dinosaur a molecule
I don’t care it can be anything we
really need to bring it to the public in
a bigger way than we we have been doing
Please follow and like us: