One of the greatest challenges I face in teaching paleontology in Chicago is finding a place to bring my classes on field trips. I also am frequently asked by members of the public “where can I take my kids to collect fossils?” Unfortunately, there are currently are very limited number…

In a Peanuts comic that had a place of honor on my dorm door, Peppermint Patty is taking an exam and is asked to: “Explain World War II.” Patty incredulously responds: “Explain World War II !?” The last panel, further explains: “Use both sides of the paper, if necessary.” I…

You are walking along a creek bed when you see an oddly shaped and colored rock. You pick it up and think “this must be a fossil!” So, you immediately take a few fuzzy photos, email them to a professional paleontologist whose name you found online, and ask them to…

$2.36 million dollars. That’s how much a private seller paid for a nearly complete skeleton of a carnivorous dinosaur sold at auction in Paris. My first reaction was, “that’s nearly enough money to fund paleontology research in the United States for a year!” My second reaction, one that I share…

One of my prized possessions is an original reprint of the seminal 1972 paper on punctuated equilibrium by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Eldredge handed it to me early in 1973, when I started as a freshman work-study student at the American Museum of Natural History. It was the…

A 1905 list of mammoths and mastodons found in Illinois stated that “The tooth of a mammoth was taken from a gravel pit near Evanston. It was placed in the Museum of Northwestern University.” I was surprised when I read this, since I was unaware of any such museum. I…

October 12, 2022 is the 13th National Fossil Day™! What is National Fossil Day (NFD)? An initiative of the National Park Service, led by NPS senior paleontologist Vincent Santucci, National Fossil Day was established in 2010 as a key part of Earth Science Week (https://www.earthsciweek.org/). Many organizations assisted NPS with…

As I discussed in my previous post, the most used indicator of a scientific paper’s impact is how often it is cited in subsequent papers. Consequently, one of the most important tasks when writing a paper is make sure that all of the key earlier works are properly named in…

Note: this blog first appeared on the website for the Paleontological Society. In the old days, before the advent of the internet and the personal computer, you kept up on the scientific literature by going to the library and examining the stacks of new journals that had just arrived. If…