Open Thread: Why Fossils?

Sheesh, I can't remember when the bug first bit me. That's too long ago. King Kong? The Zdenek Burian and Charles Knight paintings? I remember reading an Edwin Colbert book over and over in the school library. I agree with Jerry Harris in that being a science fiction fan has something to do with it. It started with dinosaurs but encompasses every part now, from the Precambrian to the Pleistocene. I guess I'm just fascinated by how evolution works and the amazing variations that appear.

Cool critters & diggin fer trilobites in my cousin's backyard swimmin hole!

But really, dinos are just part of the whole nature interest.
It's just neat that beneath the roots of a 1,000 year old tree you might find the fossil of a million year old tree.

Apparently my first word was "Parasaurolophus", so let's say it started from there! Well, it probably was quite early in life I got into dinosaurs, after a school trip to the Natural History Museum, then got into animals in general, then by early teens I got bored of dinosaurs (I know, that sounds blasphemous, but I was a moody sod back then). The love of palaeo was rekindled during my undergraduate degree, and is now my primary passion. I'd agree that the love of science fiction comes into it too, but I'm too critical of them getting things wrong, anachronisms and such.

It's a combination of things; I love history (particularly the mystery of things that happened in the past), I love biology and I love the natural world. The three things combine rather nicely in palaeo. I work in the Quaternary, where we have a much higher resolution and so we can study these things in more detail. I also like ice, which helps.

It started with a wallchart which I think was based on the iconic Nat Geo illustrations - the long-necks were all wallowing in water and the carnivores were tail-draggers.

Then I started holiday in an area with jurassic shale beaches and that was it: hunting ammonites, brachiopods and belemnites became a fascination. It still is, an I always make sure that I give away spare specimens to beachcombing kids to keep the fossil infection going.

It's also a field of science where a persistent non-academic enthusiast can make a significant impact: finding a new species or more complete specimen of a known species. I've had a couple of interesting finds (one which Brian helped get on the rounds - still un-ID'd) but wait for the day when I split a slab and find something unknown, or look up a cliff and see a pliosaur skull weathering out. When I'm off on a naturalizing walk for my blog I have to force myself to do the beach stuff - seaweeds and rockpools. I really want to be sorting through the rockfall at the base of the cliffs.

I'm buying a new rock hammer tomorrow.

There are scattered memories from my youth: recieving a stark-grey plastic Diplodocus as a present; feverishly working on a Deinonychus puzzle; watching the Christopher Reeve "DINOSAUR!" show in the 80's with Phil Tippit stop-motion dinosaurs; drawing an Ankylosaurus on my first drawing pad, but there's no "HUZZAH!" moment for me. My parents will tell you that I've loved dinosaurs since I was like 2, but I don't know how that started.

Jurassic Park was, of course, a secondary source of inspiration. I was ten when I saw it, and I don't even remember the event very well, but it certainly revialized and reinforced by obsession. My current interest in taxonomy was spawed by Greg Paul's "Predatory Dinosaurs of the World," in which is states that dromaeosaurs might be flightless birds. Around the same time I read that Tyrannosaurus was closer to Struthiomimus than to Allosaurus, which blew my mind. Suddenly dinosaur relationships became kick-ass, and I still think that.

But I think it helps that I can draw the beasts. Visualizing long-extinct organisms helps one appreciate them.

I initially discovered paleontology by accident at age 6 or 7, during the early 70s. I misunderstood the teacher when a Weekly Reader book catalog was being passed around and thought that the teacher was requiring us to choose something to purchase (It turned out to have been optional, but fortunately for my developing brain I didn't catch that at the time). The cover of a book about dinosaurs looked interesting so I chose it, got hooked on the subject, and, except for an unfortunate conformity to teenage obsession with pop culture during middle school, I've kept it up ever since, and it has expanded into an appreciation for all of nature. As a child, though, dinosaur size and ferocity weren't what impressed me, though that's what appealed to my friends; I was always more interested in what they were, what their environment was like, how we know what we know about about them, etc. Learning all that taught me how to think rationally.

I remember going to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, when I was somewhere between 6 and 8, and there was a big dino dig pretty close to the city in which I grew up, and those things interested me, but not enough to make me want to be a paleontologist.

When I was 18, I started post-secondary at a community college and took Anthro 101 because I had no idea what I wanted to do and it sounded interesting. The course was taught by a cultural anthropologist, and so we have only 1 week of human evolution, but she brought in some casts of fossil hominin skull for us to look at. The moment I picked one up, I knew that this is what I want to do. I have no idea what the attraction is, so it's hard for me to answer "why fossils"? Everything else seems boring in comparison, though, so I guess a better question for me might be "why not fossils?".

I do not distinctly remember this story, but I hear it regularly from my mother. When I was two years of age, my family stopped at a Wendy's restaurant while on vacation. The toy I received in a happy meal was a plastic Parasaurolophus. Since then, it's all been downhill.

I grew up in Rochester, NY where the Museum and Science Center (RMSC) has dioramas of paleozoic marine life; there's a eurypterid bigger than a child, and lots of other weird stuff. Trips to the museum were a common family amusement; plus, there are places all over NY state where you can pick up rocks full of fossils. I still have a drawer containing brachiopod shells, rugose corals, crinoid fragments, and the back end of a trilobite. The third big influence was a book (whose title and author I sadly can't remember) about life through time; again, it was the paleozoic and not the dinosaurs that interested me.

As other people have said, really my interest in fossils is part of a fascination with life in general, and the changing world. I got sidetracked into reading about dinosaurs as an adult, but now that I'm back living in an area with exposed Devonian strata, I've started to pay serious attention to being able to actually identify the creatures that formerly swam here.

I was ok with Dinosaurs, especially after seeing Fantasia when I was about 4.

But my *real* interest came with BBC/Impossible Pictures' Walking With [Prehistoric] Beasts. Occasional scientific inaccuracies aside, this series showed me a side of paleontology I really had never seen before. Yeah, I knew the sabertooths and Lucy and Mammoths and Neanderthals and that "popular" stuff, but I didn't know about any of the Eocene or Oligocene beasts at all, much less the idea of the terrorbirds like Gastornis. That we had nailed whale evolution with the discoveries of Ambulocetus and Basilosaurus (among others) literally gave me a "buzz" 'cause I really had no idea.

And I was 31 at the time.

No, I don't think it would have changed my career plans had I learned this stuff sooner (I'm in CS/programming), but I do love that it's something cool I can share with my kids that the schools will never touch ('cause there just isn't time, nevermind the whole evo debate).

Since then? I was cheering like my team won the playoffs when Tiktaalik was found! My office mates were quite confused...

I apparently at age 2 was completely hooked on Dinosaurs after a visit to the Calgary Zoo Dino Park. My mother tells me I called them "Duhakas" for the first while (I don't remember), but I stuck with them and eventually got their name right.

I'm with Zach on Christopher Reeves Dinosaurs being one of my big iconic childhood memories. Harryhousen movies were also a staple, in particular 1 million BC (it wasn't till my LATE teenagedom that it occurred to me that the movie had appeal beyond the Dinosaurs LOL).

King Kong actually traumatized me when I was 7. My mother had to stop the movie after the T-Rex fight cause I was crying so bad. Which probably explains my life long unexplainable hatred of Gorillas... and boy do I not like them!

Jurassic Park was a biggie of course. I went from remedial reading a year before to reading the novel 6 months before the movie came out, and understood the gist of it. It was the first movie I went to on my own, and one of the greatest motion picture memories I've ever had.

Than getting a educator gig at the Tyrrell for 4 years sealed the deal. It went from casual interest to pseudo professional one. There I got to do everything a real worker in the field does from prospecting, excavating, preperation, to my coolest project restoring an old damaged cast skeleton of a Corythosaur (though I never did manage to get it kid friendly as the plan had been, but I DID get it back together, and it was in rough shape!).

As for the future who knows. I'll sadly never be a real palaeontologist (in a pinocchio voice). Currently the Tyrannosaur Chronicles (which is going much more Dinosaur centric in about 10 posts), and two children's books I'm working on are all I've got. Hopefully it'll be more soon.

When I was 8 years old, aroung 1950, we lived in a tiny village in Minnesota. The nearest town with a movie theater was 4 miles away on a gravel road, and on Saturday afternoons my brother and I could ride our bikes there and see a movie -- a cartoon, a Lash Larue or Flash Gordon or Tarzan serial, and a two-reeler main feature, all for 14 cents.

The gravel road cut crossways across a valley about halfway between the towns, and a creek ran down the valley and under the road through a culvert. One Saturday afternoon my brother and I decided to follow the creek upstream in the valley on foot. Around mile up the creek a little run came down in a gully and fed into the creek. Turning over rocks in the run looking for crawdads we found some mysterious dime-sized flakes of blue clay. So we followed the trail of blue flakes up the run in the gulley to its source in a hilltop spring fed marshy area. The source of the blue flakes was a large bank of blue clay cut by rills from the marsh, and the clay was rotten with Ordovician (as I learned years later) fossils. Brachiopods, crinoids, corals, cephalopods, and on and on. We collected a bunch of them, filling our pockets, and I still have some that we collected that day. Interestingly, we found no trilobites, or at least we didn't collect any -- we didn't know a trilobite from a brachiopod in those days.

More than 50 years later I was back in that part of the country and drove out to that same creek, parked in a farmyard and having asked permission (a formality neglected the first time), hiked back up the valley to the gully and up the gully to the clay bank. It was still there, more eroded with more blue clay exposed, and still rotten with Ordovician fossils. I collected some more and left. Still no trilobites. :(

While I didn't wind up a paleontologist, I've maintained an interest in it ever since. My interest didn't generally extend to dinosaurs, as many kids' interest did, but stayed stuck there with the Ordovician inverts. I hope to get back to that clay bank one more time.

I had a large dinosaur picture book that I memorized at age 3; I think reading it over and over again is one of the main ways I learned to read. The book still sits on my science bookshelf. It's called, "Dinosaurs, Giants of the Past", by Eileen Daly, and illustrated by Rod Ruth.

The picture that most stands out in my mind is one of newly hatched Protoceratops leaving a sandy nest.

Like Zach, drawing these beasties goes back as far as I can remember. The earliest drawing I have is of a dragon, which I followed up with a "brontosaurus" to make the distinction. (they looked the same only the dinosaur had no spikes on its back, and didn't breathe fire).

I didn't get seriously into drawing trilobites, with fanciful wings or otherwise, until my university days. They were my way of rebelling against the fine art administration by including some evil science in my still-lifes. As I have blogged before, the first time I drew some trilobites my professor's only comments was, "ooo, I don't want any of those in MY soup!"

My interest for extinct animals - and in fact any animal - actually pre-dates my memory, wich does not reach back before age 3. This seems to run in the family, my niece knew all the 20something species of duck we have in Germany by name when she was two.

I remember seeing a picture of Diplodocus in kindergarten and thinking it was one of the most beautiful creatures ever. And I was enchanted with fossils - the idea that something that old was so perfectly preserved was amazing to me. I even got to visit the dinosaur tracks we had in Northern Arizona. Walking with dinosaurs - the ultimate in awesome!

Didn't really start studying paleontology until I started writing dragons, though. What? Why are you guys looking at me like that? I'm a fantasy writer, of course I've got dragons! I'm just sick of the just-like-Tolkien's-dragons syndrome, so I went back to the closest thing we've got and started evolving them from there. I found out during research that the buggers had gotten a lot more fascinating since I was a kid.

The history of life on earth contained within the fossil record is a boon to SF writers everywhere. I'm surprised more of us don't mine that treasure trove.

I had to think about this for a little while before making a post...

It started with plastic dinosaur toys. I don't remember the brand name but they came in a cardboard-backed blister pack. They weren't just dinosaurs either -- I can still clearly visualize a purple Moschops.

I got them when I was three and was absolutely fixated on them. Insisted that they go into the tub when I bathed, kept them in my bed at night so I'd wake up with marks on my ribs.

That was when I wrote my first song. I was quite wroth when my parents found it amusing rather than soul-stirring as I intended. "Triceratops/Triceratops/look out/all meat eaters/you have met/your DOOM!"

What made them so fascinating to me was that on one hand they were tangible objects that I owned, that I could hold in my hand, and on the other hand they represented these huge creatures that actually lived a long time ago. This was my introduction to the concept of constrained imagination. I think it was Robert Frost who described free verse as playing tennis without a net; same thing here. Imagination is a lot more fun when there are rules.

My family always had a strong interest in nature and that got tangled up in my paleontological fixation. It also helped spawn my interest in science fiction -- the first short story my dad ever read for me was A Gun For A Dinosaur, by L. Sprague deCamp, a writer I still enjoy for light reading.

It also led me into fantasy, fairy tales and mythology -- dragons and the Midgard serpent attached to my dinomania rather neatly.

My first movie? King Kong. This was right at beginning of all this. My parents, giggling with glee, left me alone in their room with our tiny black and white TV. I cannot overstate the influence this had on me as anyone leafing through my portfolio would attest.

Also, learning about dinosaurs was my first taste of scholarship and the thrill that comes with the acquisition and display of knowledge. By the time I was in grade school I was reading Raymond L. Ditmar's books on reptiles and struggling through Scientific American. My grandma gave me a subscription for my birthday for a few years there so I got the issue with Robert Bakker's Dinosaur Revolution article when I was in the fourth grade and it renewed my interest mightily.

So at the end of the day I have to blame dinosaurs for introducing me to most of the fixations that have come to rule my life -- art, writing, music, science, science fiction, fantasy, folklore, movies... Strange to see how one seed can grow so many branches.