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…

Roy E. Plotnick, Brendan M. Anderson, Sandra J. Carlson, Advait M. Jukar, Julien Kimmig and Elizabeth Petsios Frozen in time, a 125-million-year-old mammal attacking a dinosaur. A 39-million-year-old whale, the heaviest animal that ever lived. The oldest known jellyfish, from 505 million years ago. Paleontology produces newsworthy discoveries. Fossils, moreover…

I just returned from the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America (GSA) in Pittsburgh. At this point in my career, I have lost track of how many of these I have attended (more than thirty?). As I discussed during lunch with friends at a similar career stage, with…

As my-coauthors and I argue in a recently published opinion piece in Scientific American, paleontology is far more than new fossil discoveries. As exciting as the latest dinosaur or Burgess shale fossil may be, their true importance is how they contribute to our understanding of the 3.5 billion history of…

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. …