March 15, 2011
Were You Inspired by a Dinosaur?
The original mount of the AMNH Tyrannosaurus (notice the third finger on each hand). From H.F. Osborn's 1918 book The Origin and Evolution of Life.
About two weeks ago I visited the American Museum of Natural History for a preview of their upcoming dinosaur exhibit. The chance to visit the dinosaur halls—and the collections!—after dark was an opportunity I did not want to miss, especially since my first visit to the museum, in the late 1980s, gave me dinosaur dreams. I was already interested in the extinct monsters when I walked through those halls for the first time, but it is one thing to see an illustration in a book and quite another to visit the ancient bones of titans like Tyrannosaurus, “Brontosaurus” and Triceratops.
I was not the only one to be inspired by the massive bones on display at the AMNH. The late paleontologist and science writer Stephen Jay Gould often remarked that he decided to study ancient life after seeing the museum’s Tyrannosaurus skeleton as a child. How many other paleontologists and dinosaur fanatics have been similarly inspired? Standing next to the museum’s classic Allosaurus skeleton during the exhibit preview, I asked this question of a few people I had been chatting with. Some of them said that they, too, had been deeply impressed by the AMNH dinosaurs.
So I am opening the question up here, and I would especially love to hear from paleontologists. Was there a special museum visit or especially impressive skeleton that stimulated your interest in dinosaurs? I imagine that many professionals and dinosaur fans can credit the AMNH Tyrannosaurus for enlivening their interest in the field, but I would love to hear from people who had different experiences. What’s your story?
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Yes. Boringly, T.rex.
I’m not a paleontologist, just a dinosaur buff, but when I was little my dad used to take me to the Science Museum of Minnesota – they had (and have) a much smaller display of dinosaurs than at AMNH, but the Triceratops there is exquisite. I was perfectly content to spend multiple afternoons just gazing up at it.
Of course, given how awe-inspiring my little local museum was, you can imagine how overwhelming it was to visit museums like AMNH and the Natural History Museum in London.
Not surprisingly, I was inspired by T. rex. However, more by the idea of T. rex than by any specimen; it wasn’t until I was about seven or eight (and already committed to being a paleontologist!) that I saw my first actual dinosaur bones and casts of T. rex skulls, and not until I was in grad school that I actually got to see AMNH 5027.
Well, not A dinosaur, but several dinosaurs… I was eight, and when I first saw the illustration of several dinosaurs in an Encyclopaedia (called in spanish “Lo se todo”,i.e. “I know everything”), my old love for trains was instantly replaced for dinosaurs, then palaeontology and biology… Nowadays, I have a Ph.D in Biology, and work with fossils… the “tides of life” led me to work not with dinosaurs, but fossil plants, but I’m not dissapointed or anything… I love my work!
P.S. in retrospective, the illustrations of the first dinosaurs I saw in that encyclopaedia were very ugly…. but yes, the one which striked me most was a Tyrannosaurus, fighting a “serpent-like” (!?) Edmontonsaurus…
I was inspired at the age of 4 when we went to Dinosaur Park in Rapid City, SD – a series of life-sized concrete dinosaurs built during the 1930s.
I can’t say that a dinosaur was my initial spark for science since from very early childhood I was fascinated by many science-y things: animals, stars and the night sky, archaeology, etc. But I was obsessed with dinosaurs for years. I was born in New York City and visited AMNH countless times. I was a Triceratops fan. I loved the Cretaceous dinosaur gallery. I had toy dinosaurs (back before they were omnipresent) and every dinosaur book I could lay my hands on. I was going to be a paleontologist when I grew up. And yes, Fantasia was my favorite movie (still is, actually).
Well, life happened and I didn’t become a paleontologist. I’m currently a brand-new librarian and a somewhat lapsed dinosaur buff (among other things). But dinosaurs (especially that wonderful Triceratops in the AMNH Cretaceous hall) were a huge inspiration for me as a child, and surely helped me develop a scientific understanding of the world.
The thing that really got me into paleontology wasn’t a dinosaur. I was 2 or 3 and my parents had taken me to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, Canada. They had a life-sized model of a woolly mammoth and according to my parents i was hooked. We would see some of the museum and then go back to the mammoth. We would see more of the museum and then go back to the mammoth. And apparently the only way they got me to leave was by buying me a poster of it, which has been on my wall to this very day. If you have sen this mammoth it’s easy to see why: it is the best prehistoric model i have ever seen. You could go into the next gallery and see bear and deer mounts that don’t look any more realistic than it. Especially now that he is in an open air diorama, where you can even see his hair blowing in the cold northern wind. I hope to see him again this summer.
That’s not to say dinosaurs didn’t play a part. I was obsessed with dinosaurs until high school when my focus shifted to mammals (dinosaurs are still an interest, but i no longer wish to study them. I will still try to find a few for my museum if i can ever get it off the ground). Some of my earliest memories are of King Kong battling the plesiosaur and pteranodon as well as an Allosaurus being carted off by cowboys in Valley of Gwangi (and of course, i was six years old when Jurassic Park came out). Also i used to have dreams of these bizarre creatures with flat amorphous heads and then turning a corner to find a herd of elephants. Well when i was rummaging through some old photos i found a few of animatronic dinosaurs that were at the LA Museum. The weird heads i had dreamed of turned out to be the tail club of an ankylosaurus. And the elephants were the ones in the diorama at the end of the African Mammals hall. I was maybe two at the time, which is why i remembered i so vaguely.
I’m a cartoonist, and I have loved dinosaurs since… I can’t remember how long! I’ve always lived in an area that was poor on natural history museums (and was too poor to go somewhere that did have dinos) so my actual fossil viewing experiences was a traveling animatronic dinosaur show back in Kintergarden (kinda lame), the Giants of the Gobi traveling show in middle school (AWESOME if slightly outdated I was surprised to discover when I got in there), and Sue the T-Rex traveling show in high school (also AWESOME). Getting to see Sue (or the replica anyway) was mind blowing.
I tend to draw more dragons than dinosaurs nowadays (and fairly cartoony at that), but I still base the bulk of my dragons on theropods, and try to keep them looking natural by studying dino anatomy. :3
I had three awesome summers working for the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, in Drumheller, Alberta.
Needless to say, it was the best. summerstudent. job. ever!
I AM a paleontologist and author of several books on paleontology (including a chapter on kids and paleontology in my latest book, Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs). I grew up in LA, so I had both the La Brea tar pits and the Natural History Museum to inspire me, although their exhibits were limited at that time. I was hooked more by dinosaur books, although this was in the late 1950s, when almost NO kids cared about dinosaurs, and there wasn’t much to buy out there in the way of books and merchandise. Nonetheless, I was determined to become a paleontologist at age 4, and based on my familiarity with the membership of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, most professional paleontologists had a similar experience. Paleontology is not just a field you stumble into in college (although a few of my colleagues did). Since the jobs are really scarce and the pay is terrible, you have to WANT to become a paleontologist above all else. Ironically, by the time I reached college it was clear that studying dinosaurs was not the best choice, because that area of research was (and still is) crowded by too many people, many of them amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, and don’t know how to do real science. So now I work on fossil mammals (rhinos, camels, etc.), where there are LOTS of specimens with no one competing for access to them, and there are TONS of interesting evolutionary problems you can address with their much better fossil record.
I’m a paleontologist, and oddly enough I just posted about my childhood inspirations on my blog a few weeks ago (http://bit.ly/hpJF0l). I grew up so far away from any museums that by the time I entered high school I had only seen mounted skeletons twice, at the Smithsonian. The big inspirations for me were the books I could find in my elementary school library and public library (although that was too far away for regular visits), and the science books and National Geographics I would buy at flea markets.
Yes; dinosaurs in general, but ceratopsid dinosaurs specifically.
At age four or five, I staged epic battles between my model T Rex and Ankylosaurus (or sometimes Stegosaurus). And yes, I could read, I knew all the dinosaur names, and knew they went extinct after the Cretaceous. I was never exposed to big museums, but fortunately I was given books and National Geographic. Fortunately for me, this was before creationists started distributing anti-science publications.
I did my undergrad in paleontology and am now a historian of paleontology, which is awesome. I get to study paleontologists and their theories. Except for the part where there don’t seem to be any academic jobs this decade, it’s great.
I worked at the Tyrrell Museum in Alberta one summer too (with Kurt_eh, who was also my lab partner in vertebrate anatomy class – look me up on Twitter, Kurt, I’d love to catch up!) and had a blast.
I don’t remember being inspired by any particular specimens or museum visits when I was a kid; they didn’t build the Tyrrell till I was a teenager, and we didn’t have much in the way of dinosaurs at the Provincial Museum in Edmonton. But I do remember reading dinosaur books, and playing with my collection of little plastic dinosaurs. And I especially loved learning all the dinosaurs’ names, and being proud that I (a 3-yr-old) could pronounce them correctly.
My favorite specimen at the Tyrrell these days is the Dunkleosteus skull – awesome!
I was inspired by the american Godzilla movie when I was a kid. I had never seen any creature like the americanized Godzilla monster, and I watched it just about every day. Later on in my childhood, theropod dinosaurs caught my eye and I mistook them for Godzilla. These real versions of the movie monster I loved so much sparked an interest that doesn’t seem to be dying off.
What this question reminded me of was something I hadn’t thought much about in decades: dinosaur model kits. You got me digging around in Google images and finding all kinds of models that I had as a kid, some of which I had totally forgotten I’d had.
The ones I remember most, though, were an Aurora Prehistoric Scenes Styracosaurus and a Lindberg Ankylosaurus.
@ Donald: Yeah i made the switch to mammals because they just made more sense to me. dinosaurs are still an interest, but i no longer wish to study them (probably for the best, given the constantly shifting nature of dinosaur research and my depression).
“…studying dinosaurs was not the best choice, because that area of research was (and still is) crowded by too many people, many of them amateurs who don’t know what they’re doing, and don’t know how to do real science.”- Creationists have hopped on that amateur band wagon, and unfortunately mammals aren’t immune to it either: http://accpaleo.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/the-tragedy-of-lone-star/
Growing up in Gainesville, FL, my first inspirations were from the FLMNH and fossils from my backyard. So, not dinosaurs, but giant ground sloths, shark teeth, and dugong ribs. I also remember them doing an exhibit on mounting a Teleoceras from Love Bone Bed, which I could not stop obsessing over…
As for dinosaurs, I always liked ankylosaurs most, but that was from books, not museums. And yep, I’m a paleontologist too.
Saw this when I was 8. Loved it so much I included Eurypterids in my science fiction saga on the world “Siluria” where an Alien race has been keeping a time zoo
http://eurypterids.net/PterDioramaBufMus.jpg
He sailed again Eastward for several days, repeating a routine much the same. On the afternoon of the fourth day he felt the catamaran being bumped by something from underneath the water. It was the eurypterid creatures. They had massed for… a kill. Claws were coming at him from every direction, snapping with mechanical clinking and speed. He kicked them away and reached for his knife. There were four of them clambering on to the catamaran. Like they’d been waiting, sizing him up. Vince moved with lightning speed plunging the knife into midsections between their shells and kicking them back into the water oozing brown body fluids. He was cursing at them all the while, slashing and howling a war song of expletives. The catamaran slammed onto a rock outcropping and lodged there. Vince took the opportunity to leap for safer ground. The eurypterids flung themselves about in the shallows; water scorpions from hell. -Tales from the Pandoran Age
I was definitely inspired by a dinosaur! When I was a little kid I went to Rockford’s Burpee Museum of Natural History and saw BMRP 2002.4.1. and the huge tyrannosaur reconstruction in back of me. I think that’s what got me motivated to have an interest in dinosaurs.
I grew up in Larchmont, NY, about 21 miles from the AMNH. My visits there were not just visits to a museum – they were a pilgrimage to the two dinosaur halls. On one visit at age 7 (in 1958) I saw an elderly bald man answering questions for kids and adults. He seemed to know everything about the dinosaurs. It was a year later, when I saw his picture in a book, that I realized he was the legendary Barnum Brown – the greatest dinosaur man of the 20th Century.
My dad took me to the AMNH when I was five, and the story goes that I was frustrated and dissatisfied with every exhibit, asking “where is the CRETACEOUS period?” Finally we got there and it was worth the wait. The erect-postured T. rex was there, and I believe it was facing down Triceratops in the classic battle. Now called the hall of ornithischian dinosaurs, a lot has changed in that room. But the Anatotitan skeletons and the flat wall-mounted ornithopods still look the same. They evoke that first visit for me and remind me why I decided to make the career choices I did.
Yes, I had a T Rex sweatshirt as I kid that I wore till it was too small to squeeze into. But it was apatosaurus (though I knew it as brontosaurus) that really got me. It was the tallest! And I was the tallest! We had something in common! And my parents took me to the Smithsonian every year to see the dinos. Definitely responsible for an early science interest.
When I was a child, my mother used to take me to AMNH. I remember sitting sketching the dinosaur skeletons in the old pre-technological exhibit days. The skeletons were simply erected, or resurrected you might say, and left to impress on their own. And impress they did.
Years later when I wrote my first book, Rhinoceros, these dinosaurs were on my mind. I write more about it in that book’s preface and they still inspire my ideas.
As a very small child I was always collecting stones and sticks and the like then just before my 5th birthday I went on a school trip to the Natural History Museum London. There just as you enter the huge cathedral like room is a large Diplodocus – I was told that the bones had been turned to stone and I was hooked.
My fathers cousins took me to various fossil hunting sites mostly in Wales – before long I had a very annoyed mother and several broken rucksacks and a Dad complaining he was never going to carry rocks down mountains for me again. By the time I was ten there was an exhibition of animatronic dinosaurs in Cardiff (I think) which brought the creatures to life.
This led me to do a geology degree (choosing the paleo options though I didn’t get to do vertebrate paleo as I was only on the 3 yr course). From this I got summer placements at the Natural History Museum and some longer running work experience. I however did end up looking more at the microbe and early life questions rather than dinosaurs – I was very sad to have to give it up for health reasons but I am contenting myself with drawing pictures of dinosaurs and the odd diagram for friends.
I got interested during the time when the research community was beginning to question the dinosaur-reptile lineage in earnest. I vividly recall looking at pictures of dinosaurs an then my own pet parakeet and thinking, “Comon, scientists, my budgie is totally a little dino. I still have a love for the pterodactyl (scree!).
Had a dinosaur stage when a young kid, but grew out of it, then back in when a teenager when Jurassic Park came out. Interest in dinosaurs led to reading books about paleontology overall, then evolution, then Darwin and history of science.
My first memory of dinosaurs involved commercials for Honey Wheats cereal on the Howdy Doody Show around 1959 when I was seven years old. Toy dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts were offered as a premium. I got them all and after that there was no stopping me. The city where I grew up – Duluth, Minnesota – had a small museum named the Chisholm Museum, which contained a single Stegosaurus vertebra in its collection, but was better than nothing, and I loved to go see it whenever I could talk my folks into taking me.
Not long after my initiation into dinos, a road crew working on the street below ours uncovered a cache of old bones that they said my friends and I could take home if we wanted. One of the many bones I took was a vertebra that I was sure was from a Stegosaurus because it looked a lot like the one at our local museum. On a trip to Chicago, I dragged my collection of bones along hoping to have them verified as dinosaur fossils at the Field Museum. I don’t remember much about the dinosaurs we saw there, but I do remember my mom convincing the museum staff to have someone in the paleontology department examine my collection. We were sent back to the department and were greeted by an older gentleman (I’m now convinced it was Rainier Zangerl). He rooted through my bag of bones, picked out a tooth, and exclaimed in his thick German accent: “You’ve got yourself a horse.” The disappointment didn’t dampen my love of dinosaurs, and although I didn’t become a professional paleontologist I still have a deep fascination in the science.
I was fascinated by dinosaurs as a kid. Paleontology was my first career goal. I loved visiting the Cleveland Natural History museum -still do! I ended up in biology instead of paleontology, but I still love reading about dinosaurs. Fast forward 30 years and it’s my son’s turn for dino-obsession. There is so much more cool information out there today – in so many forms! Wonderful books, games, movies, websites etc inspired him to learn names, habits, origins, time periods for many, many species. We’ve traveled back to the museum in Cleveland many times, the Smithsonian, and even a week at Dinosaur National Monument. He’s in middle school now and the early obsession has to share time with many other interests, but paleontology still ranks high in the list of possible careers. It will be interesting to see what his final choice will be.
What helped flip me was the Corythosaurus skeleton that used to be in the main hall of Philadelphia’s Natural History Museum. Plus a flash card set of sixties vintage whose maker I forget — it had “Pithecanthropus,” for one.
I don’t remember what it was that drew me to dinosaurs but I remember deciding one day when I was still a young kid that they were very cool. Probably the coolest thing out there. From then on people kept giving me dinosaur stuff. I never got to see many dinosaurs when I was a kid as I grew up on an island. When exhibits did come through, or we went on a trip, it was always a really special treat to get to see real dinosaurs.
Funnily enough, my ‘inspiration’ came just recently. I have a degree but my husband and a lot of my friends are going for their second, not always in a related field. I live in Manitoba, and I’ve taken dinosaur-themed trips through Alberta, Ontario, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, and I’m at the point where going back to school to study palaeontology doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Why not? Maybe when I retire.
I never grew out of dinosaurs. I just love them.
Dante, thanks for posting that picture of the eurypterid diorama at the Buffalo Museum of Science! It was very likely made by the same person who did the paleozoic dioramas at the Rochester Museum and Science Center, which I gazed at so often in my childhood. They also had a eurypterid as large as a human child; my imagination dreamed among the colorful crinoids swaying in the currents. Here in western New York State, it’s possible to pick up brachiopods and horn corals along many streambeds, and I certainly had a collection of them, including a prized (though incomplete) trilobite. My favorite paleo-book was Virginia Lee Burton’s “Life Story”, and again it was the Paleozoic that caught my interest rather than the dinosaurs (frankly, Burton’s dino pictures are not impressive). I did not become a scientist, but I’ve kept up an interest in the local geology, and I like to take visitors out and show them Devonian strata.
Well, it wasn’t just museum dinosaurs that inspired me, though they did help. The problem was that there were no major museums near where I lived. Much of my early inspiration came from models and TV shows. I remember my parents getting me a set of Carnegie models, as well as regularly watching Walter Cronkite’s Dinosaur! as well as the PBS documentary The Dinosaurs! At one point my parents took me to the California Academy of Sciences (back when that museum still cared about paleontology) and I was awestruck by Stephen Czerkas’ Deinonychus sculptures, as well as the Tyrannosaurus skeleton. Another case of museum inspiration came when I was six, when I was taken to the Los Angeles County Museum. I was just thrilled when I walked in and saw the Dueling Dinosaurs. In way, I’m glad there weren’t many museums near me when I was a kid, for it made the rare visits more of a treat, and more inspirational.
I remember my mom taking me to see the Natural History Museum of Helsinki, Finland, when I was six years old. There was a special dinosaur exhibit at the time, and I remember looking up to the skeletons of hadrosaurs in the hall and recognizing the large blob of bone as a tyrannosaur skull.
I was interested in animals in general before, but that visit to the museum really sparked my interest. Now I’m at the university studying evolutionary biology and paleontology.
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