Is this your dream job?
Absolutely, ever since I was a child. My earliest memory of dinosaurs is probably from when I was 3 or 4 when I watched Barney on TV one morning, and I learned that he was a dinosaur called Tyrannosaurus rex. So for a while I thought all dinosaurs were friendly—that is, until I watched Jurassic Park! After that, my career was set in stone, as they say.
Along with being a fossil preparator, you’re a paleoartist for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. What exactly does that mean?
The majority of my work involves the preparation of fossils for research and display. Most of the paleoart I create is digital. Primarily, I make and update skeletal diagrams for use in our fossil restoration projects. I have also done live reconstructions from fossils.
Live reconstructions sound fascinating. What do those entail?
It’s a process that allows us—scientists and artists together—to show what extinct prehistoric animals and plants may have looked like. It entails relying on whatever remains we have in fossil form, whether it be bones, impressions, or a perfectly mummified individual, to make comparisons with living relatives. That can give us clues on their appearances. I usually start with a picture of the fossil, and I sketch over it digitally. To ensure scientific accuracy, nothing is added unless there is evidence for it. This evidence can come from the fossil itself or a living relative with similar features.
Do you have a go-to example of a living relative of a dinosaur?
One of my favorite “living dinosaurs” is the emu. These flightless birds are human-sized and have shaggy, primitive-looking feathers. They lay eggs that are dark blue, almost black. But most interestingly, they’ve got literal dinosaur feet with sharp claws, and not just on their toes. They also have two claws on each of their tiny wings.
I imagine the cleaning and repairs you do as a preparator lend an intimacy with the subjects you draw and model. How do you balance imagination with scientific accuracy?
I use a fossil I have as a base, such as bones, shells, or even a leaf. I then outline the general shape. My imagination can take over with patterns and textures taken straight from nature with what, to me, makes the most sense for the creature in the kind of environment it lived in. That’s where science intersects with art.
How do your renderings guide what the museum’s audience takes away from exhibits?
From the art I provide, the museum visitors can make the connection between something long dead and unknown to a more familiar kind of life. They now have a point of reference for what they may not have been able to pick up on when the creature was preserved only in stone.
Discovering the unknown must be a beautiful experience.
What fascinates me the most working in my field is that I can always be surprised by something new. New fossil discoveries are being made all the time, constantly redefining what we know about prehistory. Anytime I uncover a fossil, I am the first person to ever see it. That is a feeling I want to pursue for the rest of my life.
Can you describe that feeling?
It’s euphoric, akin to what I suppose winning the lottery feels like. Knowing how rare and old fossils are, each discovery feels like the first time, even if you’ve been digging for years. That small, dinosaur-obsessed child in me shines through every time.
Did your team make any particular discovery that especially made that child’s eyes gleam?
It never fails to make all children’s eyes gleam, actually … the allosaurus skull in the Dinosphere. With a nearly full set of teeth, it is reminiscent of the Jurassic Park logo, except that our allosaurus was a real Jurassic dinosaur, not a movie one.
You just returned from the famed Jurassic Mile in Wyoming, where you participated in a joint dig between the Children’s Museum and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center of the Netherlands. What was the most rewarding part of the adventure?
For me, that joint dig was about learning new things, both scientifically and culturally. I will never pretend to know everything, so I try to keep an open mind when it comes to understanding a different culture or a new scientific method. On the technical side, I learned that by digitally mapping our dig site with drone photography and GPS, we can have an easily shareable and accurate map of the fossils we had found so far. Apart from that, I learned that my European counterparts have similar taste in music. We all like classic rock. The most memorable aspect, however, was simply nerding out together with people who travelled even farther than I did to dig up dinosaur bones.
You have an evolutionary biology degree from the University of Cambridge. Did you ever picture yourself working behind glass with people watching you as you do in the Paleo Prep Labs? What’s it like to be doing cutting-edge research and educating the public at once in real time?
It is my own opinion that the education part of the job is the most important. Without communicating our findings to our visitors, my work means nothing. By being accessible to everyone, we promote science to children, parents, students, all ages, and all backgrounds through these fossils. Dinosaurs have mass appeal, and thanks to that, we can be a gateway for young future scientists wanting to do the kind of work that I do.
