Help Brian Switek Tell the Stories of Fossil Hunters in the Field

...at its core, fieldwork still relies on patience, luck, and a strong back to carry enough water to fight off lingering hangovers. - Brian Switek, from his "Have Allosaurus, Will Travel" Kickstarter campaign page.

Brian Switek prepares to enter Natural Trap Cave. Photo by Eric Scott.

Brian Switek is on a mission to tell a story. For years, he has carved out a niche as a journalist of life's history, and has written about every major palaeontology story in recent memory. More importantly, he's shed light on many that don't hit the front pages. He's told these stories via the various incarnations of his Laelaps blog, as a freelance reporter, and as the author of the popular Written in Stone and My Beloved Brontosaurus (as well as his new Prehistoric Predators, featuring the art of Julius Csotonyi, which I reviewed last week).

Next, he intends to tell the stories of the men and women who work for months in conditions most people wouldn't tolerate for a day to make the shiny museum exhibits and cavorting CGI saurians possible. He describes it as a need more than a want. To make this possible, he's raising funds via Kickstarter to allow him to spend the summer traveling between 10 important dig sites across western North America, spanning the last 250 millions years of Earth's history.

I love this idea. Pop-palaeontology often jettisons the uncertainty and debate that surround discoveries. Look no further than the NatGeo Spinosaurus blitz of last year, in which the publication of new fossil material was accompanied by a documentary, magazine cover story, and museum exhibition. These publicity efforts sell the public a story, one that tends to elide the "more research is needed" that is almost always part of a research paper's conclusions.

Brian is on the road now, but took a few minutes to do a brief interview about the project.

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What do you think are the major misconceptions people have about the way field work and other research is undertaken?

Have a look at paleontology news items. Most of them are about the results of science - the naming of a new species, or a discovery about the way a particular animal lived. The passion of paleontology - the thing that keeps people trudging through deserts and spending countless hours in the lab - is often missing. That's symptomatic of science storytelling in general. The result is the focus rather than the process. And even though the first Jurassic Park film came out over 20 years ago, it partly fills that void. I regularly get asked whether paleontologists use ground-penetrating radar to find fossils (nope) and there's often an assumption that dinosaurs come out of the ground as lovely, articulated skeletons (that's rare).

The truth is that fieldwork roughly resembles how it was done a century ago. Making an important discovery starts with being dirty, sweaty, tired, and possibly hungover on long desert hikes where you feel like your brain is going to boil out of your ears. And when you find a fossil of note, it's often the beginning of commitment that involves years of digging, chipping, studying, and puzzling. It takes a special kind of madness to enjoy this kind of work, but it's that human story that I want to tell.

What media - writing or otherwise - do you think has done a good job of telling the story of palaeontology?

Some of the best works on the process of paleontology are books that look at the history of the discipline. Some that immediately come to mind are Paul Brinkman's The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, David Rains Wallace's The Bonehunters' Revenge, and the harder-to-find biography of O.C. Marsh by Charles Schuchert and Clara MaeLeVene. Maybe it's because we're more distant from these researchers - and their dinosaur-sized personalities - so we feel more comfortable talking about their successes as well as their faults. Whatever the reason, these books are at the intersection of science and the personalities that drove it.

Do you have a favorite field site you've visited?

I don't know if I can choose! I've been lucky enough to work at a variety of sites around the west over the past four summers, and each has its own flavor. Quarries brimming with bone, such as Ghost Ranch, are nice, but there's nothing quite like the thrill of going prospecting to find a new site. So even though I can't pick a favorite, I'll say that I'm the most excited about the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry. It's a rich Jurassic boneyard full of Allosaurus, and last summer I found a new dinosaur site outside the main quarry. I don't know what dinosaur it is or how much is in the rock, but in a few weeks I'll be going back to find out.

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Best of luck to Brian in his efforts - I know firsthand how difficult crowdfunding can be. At the time of this posting, he has a week to raise about half of his funds, so please do consider pitching in and spreading the word on social media. Let's help him in this effort to sing the praises of palaeontology's usually unsung heroes.

Review: Prehistoric Predators

Two years ago, after the director of Jurassic World confirmed that the movie would not feature feathered Velociraptors, John Conway wrote a brief but influential blog post about the effects of what he called Awesomebro culture on perceptions of nature and, specifically, palaeontology. While pitched at a popular audience, Prehistoric Predators, newly published by Cider Mill Press, hits the scene at a time that palaeoart hobbyists, professionals, and enthusiasts are looking critically at the ways that palaeoart can evolve in a pop culture that still holds on to a view of dinosaurs as monsters. Illustrated by Julius Csotonyi and written by Brian Switek, the book is tightly focused on its titular topic, offering almost a hundred pages of ancient beasts in the heat of predatory action.



In the hands of lesser talent, a project like this could go off the rails. But Csotonyi has proven himself time and time again in his adherence to accuracy as well as drama, and Switek is the most prominent writer continually working the palaeontological beat, not afraid of nuance and uncertainty as he portrays the science to his readers. They're supported in the project by an impressive production team, who have wrapped their words and images in a beautiful package. The skin of Csotonyi's vibrant Giganotosaurus close-up cover art features a pebbly, textured surface, with glossy teeth and title text. The end-papers are a pattern made of some of the book's featured predators. And the book is a generous size, measuring just a bit under 12" x 11", as large as it is the the recent Titan Books publications Dinosaur Art and The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi. With a retail price of $20 US, it's a great deal for the amount of art and information within.

The Mesozoic gets the vast majority of the attention, comprising about 2/3 of the book's pages, so there's no doubt about the book's real stars. The theropods of Prehistoric Predators are decked out with feathers and filaments, from the plumes of Ornithomimus to the moss-and-rust fuzz covering Daspletosaurus (an update of his Judith River mural at the HMNS - the original is much less fuzzy). There's a good variety of takes on integument, and though it's not a focus of the text, readers will come away with a view of dinosaurs that is thoroughly contemporary, and for the most part the animals feel real, weighty, as if caught in mid-action by a preternaturally brave photographer. There are spots where feathers are a bit too detailed to my eye, a bit too shaggy, a bit too closely tracing the contours of the body. When dealing with a group of animals experimenting with plumage, I suppose it makes sense to assume that not all would be covered in a "dynamic shell" of feathers, as Matt Martyniuk has put it. It can be hard for me to completely buy illustrations that split the difference between fuzz and full, birdy plumage. But this is an issue that is larger than is wise to tackle in a review.

Though the overall project will satisfy anyone coming to see high stakes conflict, we do get glimpses of animals in less extreme circumstances, such as the alvarezsaur Linhenykus keeping an eye on the horizon, Cryolophosaurus wading at the Antarctic coast, or Guanlong drinking water in the amber light of dusk. The book features a handful of new pieces, with my favorite being a spread featuring new-look Spinosaurus squabbling with a pair of crimson-headed Deltadromaeus over a sawfish. Csotonyi has also confirmed that besides the Daspletosaurus noted above, several other pieces that have appeared elsewhere have been revised for new information. A bit of dodgy stock art shows up, with the worst case being the introduction to the Permian period, and readers familiar with Csotonyi's work would be able to pick those inferior animals immediately, even without warning.

For younger readers and others who aren't as familiar with palaeontlogy as LITC readers, this would be a solid choice for an introduction to what we know about the history of carnage-dealing beasts on Earth. Switek ably summarizes the featured geological eras and offers plenty of evidence-based descriptions of the animals. Again, even if we are mostly concerned with feats of predation here, readers learn about their palaeoecology, the varieties of theropod diets, and the ranges of size they attained (still an underappreciated fact, in my experience). Therizinosaurus gets a whole spread, Oviraptor is featured prominently, and Sinornithosaurus is seen from the point of view of its prey animal (with no mention of the controversial claim that it had venom glands). Only a few animals are depicted with scale diagrams, and not all of the "lesser" participants in the illustrations are named, but the amount of information is impressive. Switek's descriptions are approachable and light on jargon, taking confused time-travelers by the hand as they visit these lost worlds and their fantastic denizens.

In Prehistoric Predators, the Awesomebro is served up with a hearty helping of modern palaeontological knowledge. I'm optimistic that the book can lead readers to learn more about other aspects of extinct life that are less red in tooth and claw. There will always be a side of palaeontology media that focuses on the monstrous side of life, but that's no different than any nature media. It's refreshing to see it done with such care.

Book Review: My Beloved Brontosaurus

The gap between the popular "Dinosaur" and the scientific constructs of the animals called dinosaurs - an increasingly awkward classification, as Matt Martyniuk has pointed out - has been fertile material for this and other blogs. The natural world is not made of discrete, clean containers of organisms, but rather a messy, interconnected, continually evolving web of life reaching back into the obscurity of deep time. We humans like our toy boxes, though, organizing the components of the natural world in a way that makes us comfortable. That tension is at the heart of Brian Switek's recently published My Beloved Brontosaurus, in which he deftly brings the concerns of dinosaur fanatics regarding the dinosaurian public image to the popular culture.

Coming in at a little over 200 pages, Switek's second popular science book is a breezy read, accessible to an audience who may enjoy Radiolab and Science Friday, but doesn't follow all of the latest paleontology news on a regular basis. It's a beautifully designed book, with a dust cover folding out to a large double-sided poster by Mark Stutzman. On the front, Switek presents an Apatosaurus - deliberately outsized for dramatic purposes, Switek has explained - with a bouquet of flowers. On the back, he crouches before a mount of the same animal. Even the case binding is beautiful, with illustrated typography rendered as if revealed between layers of Lagerstätten. The illustrators whose work populates the book will be familiar to the on-line paleo community, too. Switek had the good taste to choose work from Mike Keesey, Jeff Martz, and our very own Niroot.

My Beloved Brontosaurus is loosely structured as a road trip, couching topics such as dinosaur origins, size, social life, bird ancestry, and sex in Switek's visits to museums and field sites. You can feel the exhilaration of stepping out into the clarity of the desert or peeking behind the curtains to see the inner workings of natural history museum collections. The way scientists explain ancient life accompany the popular stories of the same. He presents himself as a relentless searcher rather than an authority, with curiosity as his most essential tool.

For the die-hard paleontology fan, there won't be a lot of material that is brand-new, but it's still a refreshing read to travel along with a writer who clearly appreciates how lucky he is to be able to embark on these travels. And of course, it's always a treat to read someone so captivated by the romance of natural history. As he writes in his chapter about the end-Cretaceous extinction,

Turning over the Triceratops tooth in my hand... I envision an old, solitary dinosaur standing the Cretaceous twilight. One of her horns is broken, and her face is scarred with signs of a hard life in the land of tyrannosaurs. The terminal member of her species, she holds a lonely vigil as the horizon swallows the sun, and the Cretaceous closes.

Additionally, My Beloved Brontosaurus serves as an object lesson in how to communicate paleontological research, engaging less informed readers with the insights of creative researchers. In his chapter on the sensory life of dinosaurs, Switek recounts the way David Evans, Ryan Ridgely, and Larry Witmer spin research into dinosaur hearing to consider what it says about vocal ranges. For those whose only image of paleontolgy in practice is Grant and Sattler dusting off Velociraptor bones in the badlands, the creativity of modern paleontologists will be eye-opening.

It's more than simply a dinosaur book for adults, though: throughout, Switek subtly makes the case for science as a way to understand the world and, to that effect, the continual dialogue of science. It's an antidote to cartoonish headlines which give the impression that science keeps changing its mind. The way an answer blossoms into a field of new questions, the way scientists accept uncertainty and relish mystery is all in here. It's not a hard pitch, which makes it all the more effective. Switek's message is that dinosaurs are a relevant, vital field of study because the illumination extends to broader issues of evolution and the fate of our world. In the same way, My Beloved Brontosaurus uses the engaging topic of dinosaur lives as a way to celebrate the ongoing exploration of science at large.

Fuzzy Sauropodlet

Well, perhaps a juvenile rather than a 'sauropodlet', but I hope that got your attention, at any rate.

Brian Switek (who surely requires no introduction here) commissioned this highly speculative fuzzy little Apatosaurus from me for his forthcoming book, My Beloved Brontosaurus, to 'visualize a point' and to 'shock readers a little and then explain the image'. It is reproduced in greyscale in the book, but this is the original drawing. I had Brian's permission to share this a while ago, but quite forgot to do so here (chiefly because I still feel ill-qualified as a contributor. Sorry, folks). It is perhaps timely that I chose at last to post this today, since it also happens to be Brian's birthday. I hope you'll join me in wishing him many very happy returns.

As usual, please open the image in a new tab for best viewing!

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Written in Stone: some thoughts

I want to be Brian Switek when I grow up. The guy gets to write about dinosaurs all day long, and not only that, but he's paid for it and people read what he has to say. I'm in awe..the jammy git. This is a somewhat belated review of his last book (there's another one out in the not too distant future!), and I must say up front that it is really rather enjoyable. Given that it's old news, I'll try and keep this brief.

Second edition UK paperback (mine!)

A lot of what Switek offers up here will be familiar to the average reader of this blog, but contrariwise a lot of it probably won't be; certainly, I learned a fair amount about the complex evolutionary history of whales and, in particular, horses from reading this book. While the feathered dinosaur stuff won't be anything new, you're almost certainly going to learn something.

Moreover, even if you happen to be, say, a bona fide scientist (don't laugh - we do have some of them turn up here) with a specialism in a relevant field, it's possible to really appreciate Switek's passion for the subject matter. Most readers will probably be familiar with his blog writing, and while that's certainly very good it is nevertheless difficult to deny that Written in Stone is a cut above. This is particularly true of the final chapter about human evolution - Switek builds to a Big Finish that puts us firmly in our evolutionary place and, happily, smacks down the silly idea that the evolution of a humanoid creature is somehow inevitable (as exemplified by the 'Dinosauroid', which I must apologise to certain people for mentioning again). After all, "we are creatures of time and chance".

By the same token, Switek's chronicling of the earliest days of palaeontology is not only fascinating in itself (even if a lot of it will be familiar to those who have read, for example, Deborah Cadbury's The Dinosaur Hunters), but one can't help but make the connection between the repressive influence of religion back then and the apparent resurgence of fundamentalist nonsense today. What's striking is just how much quicker scientific progress might have been if the thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries did not view the accommodation of religious views a necessity; either out of genuine piety, or because religion held such power in society. It's also amusing just how closely some of their views, long since revised and/or abandoned, resemble current creationist thinking.

Enough about all that, though - I mentioned horses a couple of paragraphs back, and indeed the chapter on horse evolution is one of the best; it not only chronicles the earliest discovery of potential ancestral horses, but brings things right up to date by blowing away any preconceived notions you might have had about a 'chain of progress' in horse evolution. The idea that evolution necessarily presents orderly 'progress' or 'improvement' is a false paradigm* anyway, but the neat progression from a small, multiple-toed animal up to a large, single-toed one remains a persistent meme. Hopefully, people picking up this book for the dinosaurs and whales (ahem) will learn a lot about just how crazily branching the 'tree of life' really is, especially in the light of the fossil evidence we now have. As Switek puts it, "living horses are just the last remaining twig of a previously much richer family" - and he says much the same about elephants in another excellent chapter.

Ultimately - without wishing to blather on too much - this book serves as a marvelous refresher in the bamboozling complexity of the evolutionary history of life on Earth, and even of what might be considered quite small clades, relatively speaking. It's also a riveting tour through the history of palaeontological discovery.

*Yes, I just did.

Interview with Brian Switek

Since beginning his blogging career around the middle of this rapidly dwindling decade, Brian Switek has risen to become arguably the most visible and important blogger writing about paleontology. From dinosaurs to Cenozoic mammals to the evolution of our own species - assuming there's not a precocious budgie out there perusing this blog - Brian has a wide ranging curiosity about the history of life on Earth and how paleontology has contributed to our knowledge.

To that end, he recently published his first book, Written in Stone, which looks at some of life's most important evolutionary transitions as told by paleontology. If you've read his work at Laelaps and Dinosaur Tracking, you'll already know that Brian is an exhaustive researcher and picks out little-known historical facts with the relish of a bone sharp sniffing out a fossil. This is exactly the spirit in which Written in Stone is written, and suspect it will tip off the "old media" that an important new voice in science communication has arrived. Much pro-evolution writing lately has downplayed the importance of the fossil record, and Brian ably makes a case that there is still much to be gained by studying the fossil evidence of ancient life. Incidentally, I'll be posting my own review of Written in Stone, hopefully next week.

Brian recently offered some of his time to do an interview, and I began by asking about another science communicator who was important to his development as a writer as well as mine, the late Stephen Jay Gould.

You've mentioned Stephen Jay Gould as an influence. Which of his pieces of writing are most important to you?

I adore Gould's essays. When I feel dried out and I need some inspiration, I usually pick up one of his anthologies (as well as collections by David Quammen and Robert Sapolsky) to recharge myself. Even when Gould wrote books - such as Wonderful Life and Full House - he did so in a winding, circuitous manner which seemed like a series of essays strung together along a central argument, but it was the anthologies I loved best.

As for the most personally influential bits of Gould's writing, however, I can name two essays from two of his later books. The first is the eponymous essay from The Lying Stones of Marrakech, and the second is "A Lesson From the Old Masters" in Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. I read Lying Stones at a critical time when I was just getting back into science. I did not know very much about paleontology, evolution, or history, but by recounting a centuries-old fossil prank Gould convinced me that it is of extreme importance to understand the history of science. Our present ideas about the history of life are moored to a long history of scientific discovery and debate. Science, after all, is a human enterprise - how can we possibly appreciate our current perspective without understanding how ideas about prehistory have changed over time?

As for the second essay, I was fascinated by the way in which Gould wove together concepts from art, history, paleontology, and evolutionary theory to revise our image of the famous "Irish elk" Megaloceros giganteus. (To trim a long story short, cave paintings showed that both males and females of this giant deer had prominent humps on their backs - a finding which stemmed solely from a few crude drawings left behind by a prehistoric artisan who simply recorded what they had observed in nature.) Gould had taken a simple discovery, something which would probably only get a 200-word news brief today, and turned it into an exploration of how we reconstruct the fossil record and the joys of isolated observations which force us to change our perspective. (In fact, I just re-read this essay just before answering these questions, and it was just as good as I remembered it being when I first read it on a Rutgers bus over four years ago.)

You discuss a lot of scientists and thinkers who don't get a lot of exposure. Was there one in particular who was a revelation to you as you researched Written in Stone?

Oddly enough, I was most impressed by the work of Thomas Henry Huxley. He is the kind of naturalist who - despite being so readily recognized - is hidden in plain sight. I had always heard of him as "Darwin's Bulldog" and the man who first proposed that dinosaurs had evolved into birds, but when I read his original work I was surprised by how much more there was to his research. Some of his ideas - such as the argument that most major evolutionary changes occurred during non-geologic time that would never be tapped by paleontologists - have obviously turned out to be wrong, but in other ways he was a very modern thinker and writer. During a time when evolutionists were hungry for fossils exhibiting transitional features Huxley stressed caution - it is important to discern between evolutionary "uncles" and "fathers." In terms of avian origins, especially, Huxley used various lines of evidence to re-envision dinosaurs and propose them as the sort of creatures from which birds evolved. He did not say that little Compsognathus was ancestral to Archaeopteryx (the earliest recognized bird), but instead cast it as the sort of creature from which birds had been derived. Once I got beyond the popular caricatures, I was fascinated by the role Huxley played in the nascent field of evolutionary science.

(For those interested in the particulars of Huxley's ideas regarding the evolution of birds, I wrote an academic paper on the subject - my first - which has just been published in the Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians volume published, appropriately, by the Geological Society of London. For those who want to dig into the life of this influential naturalist, I recommend Adrian Desmond's biography Huxley.)

Owen is another scientist whose reputation you help to restore in Written in Stone. Do you feel a sense of duty to present forgotten nuances of these figures who as you point out, are often reduced to caricatures?

I can't really take much credit for restoring Owen. Historians like Adrian Desmond, Nicolaas Rupke, and paleontologist Kevin Padian have all done more than I have, but I wanted to make sure I spent some time talking about Owen and the odd place he occupied in Victorian science.

Viewed from our modern perspective - in which history is often given short shrift - it seems easy to divide the naturalists of the day into evolutionist and creationist camps based upon their opposition to Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. Doing so, however, is rather poor history, especially since many naturalists who opposed the idea of evolution by natural selection were themselves evolutionists!

Owen is probably the most prominent example. In his lecture On the Nature of Limbs (printed in 1849), Owen ends by invoking "natural laws or secondary causes" to explain "the orderly succession and progression of ... organic phaenomena" such as the homology of the vertebrate skeleton. In other words, Owen was thinking about evolution - and publicly speculating about it! - a decade before On the Origin of Species was printed. The social conservatives who made up Owen's main support group understood this and balked at it, but Owen's habit of clothing his language in religious terms often confused evolutionists within Darwin's camp. If you read Darwin's letters about Owen, it is clear that Darwin knew that Owen was an evolutionist and that Owen was seriously pissed about being mentioned as one of the naturalists who affirmed the "immutability" of species in On the Origin of Species, but - perhaps principally because of his condescending and self-referential critiques of natural selection - Owen has wrongly been cast as a creationist by those ignorant of history.

So, to put it a bit more simply, I did feel an obligation to do justice to naturalists like Owen who have often been sorely misunderstood. Even so, I found the actual stories to be much more engrossing than the standard, textbook-cardboard version I had so often been taught. It was actually a lot of fun to dig into these stories and introduce lay readers to an unfamiliar view of history.

What modern paleontologists do you hold in high esteem?

That is a ticklish question. Admittedly I feel a little sheepish about answering given that I have met and corresponded with so many exceptionally-talented paleontologists over the past few years that I worry about leaving someone out! Off the top of my head - and mind you this is just the tip of the iceberg - I have been very much impressed by the work of Larry Witmer, Jennifer Clack, Hans Thewissen, Elisabeth Vrba, Phil Currie, Jakob Vinther, and Andy Farke. I could go on and on about any of these people, but I do want to save special mention for David Parris. David is the head curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum and is one of the most brilliant people I have ever met. He knows more about natural history than I probably ever will, he always has a story to tell, and he has been exceptionally kind to this nascent naturalist. In fact, he has been kind enough to let me work on prepping a Thoracosaurus skeleton at the museum twice a week, and I am grateful that he has given me a chance to engage directly in paleontology at the museum.

This summer, Scott Sampson wrote a pair of posts at his Whirlpool of Life blog that resonated with me, about the way the idea of "natural history" has faded as scientific disciplines have become more specialized. Do you have any special affinity for the phrase, or the idea of the "naturalist" in the mold of someone like the scientists of the Victorian era?

I do. Like Scott, I think true naturalists - those scientists who have a deep understanding of various parts of the natural world - are very rare. David Parris, the head curator of the natural history department at the New Jersey State Museum, is one of the few naturalists I know. I have never met anyone with such a comprehensive knowledge of zoology, geology, vertebrate paleontology, and invertebrate paleontology - he knows something about just about everything! That kind of brilliance is very rare. I wish I had it. I know a bit about evolution, zoology, and vertebrate paleontology, but I am useless when it comes to geology, botany, and other disciplines which full under the banner of natural history.

To a certain extent, I think our increased understanding of the natural world has made it more difficult to be a naturalist. Pick any aspect of natural history you like - it is impossible to read all the literature and it can be extremely difficult to keep up with new discoveries. To some degree, specialization is needed because no one person can keep up with it all! Beyond that, though, many of the 19th century naturalists we admire were trained in a very different way than modern scientists. There were no PhD programs in paleontology or specially-designed arrays of classes for them to take. They went out into the field to study, went on excursions with their professors, and, in general, learned about natural history by engaging in the process of discovery. We don't have that now. Instead we have a long training period where a particular focus is selected and courses relevant to that single question (or set of questions) are carefully selected. Still, there are people who still follow in the self-taught tradition of the 19th century naturalists - learning about nature just because they are so in awe of it - so I think there will always be at least a few naturalists, no matter how rare they are.

Regarding those disciplines of natural history that you don't have a strong grasp of, which one do you most want to learn more about?

Geology. No question. Geology provides the context for so much of our understanding of prehistoric life, and I really need to make a more concerted effort to educate myself about the geological aspects of paleontology.

What old stale notions about prehistoric life do you most wish would just disappear? It seems like if you spend any amount of time writing about paleontology, there are certain myths you can't avoid dispelling over and over again.

The "March of Progress" - or the idea that evolution proceeds towards particular goals which are inherently superior to all previous stages - is one. (I recently wrote a take-down of this subject for the Scientific American guest blog.) We know evolution does not work that way, yet the imagery keeps cropping up over and over again! It will probably remain with us for some time, however. If Stephen Jay Gould couldn't dispel this myth (see the opening chapter of Wonderful Life), then I doubt that I can do much better!

If you don't mind me tweaking your question a little bit, though, I think myths about the history of science bother me more. We have a habit of creating a villain for every hero and interpreting the process of science itself as an onward-and-upward endeavor in which every new bit of data fits neatly into the puzzle of the natural world. Yet this isn't so. Science is very circuitous and is marked by contingent events just like evolution itself. Take feathered dinosaurs for example. For reasons relating to where the science of paleontology developed, culture, and politics, the feathered dinosaurs of China have only just recently become known to us. Imagine if, by some stroke of luck, British naturalists became aware of the feathered dinosaurs of Liaoning, China right around 1861, when the first recognized skeleton of Archaeopteryx was discovered in Germany. Such an event would probably have changed the nature of the debates over the origin of birds which followed. True, we can't know for sure what really would have happened, but my point is that lucky discoveries and contingent events influence our ideas about the natural world, yet this concept is not often grasped.

What recent technological development do you think has the most potential to give new insights into the ways dinosaurs lived? Or conversely, do you see any potential pitfalls with any of them?

I was extremely excited to see Jakob Vinther's discovery that well-preserved dinosaur feathers retain tiny, pigment-carrying spherules called melanosomes and therefore can give us an idea of how some dinosaurs were colored. Work in this area is obviously just beginning, but, in addition to giving us new insights into the color of feathered dinosaurs, these techniques might allow us to detect differences between the sexes of individual dinosaur species and detect the range of variations present in feathered dinosaurs (both important to understanding the evolution of these animals). Unfortunately not all colors will be preserved - some colors, such as yellows and oranges, are the result of biochemistry rather than melanosomes - but the ability to detect dinosaur colors will undoubtedly improve our understanding of how these animals lived and evolved. It is truly wonderful.

With Reign of the Dinosaurs, Terra Nova, and the recently announced Walking With Dinosaurs 3D project, it's gearing up to be a big couple of years for dinosaurs in the public consciousness. What do you hope to see, or hope these productions avoid?

It is funny how different people can have disparate perspectives - I just recently talked to some folks involved in television production and they said interest in dinosaurs seems to be waning! Clearly, with all these major projects starting up, that's not the case.

In terms of the programs you mentioned specifically, I am not sure how I feel about them. On the one hand it is wonderful to see dinosaurs restored through ever-better computer technology, but the presentation of the dinosaurs often bugs me. As visually impressive as the original Walking With Dinosaurs was, I didn't particularly like the storytelling style which obscured the science behind those restorations. (To provide a bit of personal context, I grew up watching programs like 1985's Dinosaur! - best known as the program hosted by Christopher Reeve - which mixed wonderful special effects by Phil Tippet with the story of dinosaur discoveries.) Using narratives involving the dinosaurs themselves to draw audiences in is good, but what good are they if we don't explain how we know dinosaurs would have looked like that or done those things?

This isn't just me. More than a few times, I have been watching dinosaur documentaries with non-paleontologists and had them ask me "Wait, how do they know that?" at certain points. Viewers know that our knowledge of dinosaurs is incomplete and constantly-changing, and I think we need more programs which explain the science of what goes into bringing a dinosaur back to life.

Lest I sound too cranky, though, I am sure I will watch all these programs and delight in seeing dinosaurs walking around. Reign of the Dinosaurs and Walking With Dinosaurs 3D will undoubtedly be beautiful programs which will likely be cited by a future generation of paleontologists as being important in stoking their love of prehistoric life, and that's a good thing.

What has been your favorite paleontology story of 2010?

That is a tough one. There have been so many discoveries and announcements... it is difficult to choose! I guess, if I had to pick just one, I would pick the description of Utahceratops and Kosmoceratops. I had actually seen the skull of at least one of these dinosaurs in the prep lab of the Utah Museum of Natural History in the summer of 2009, and I visited the place where they were found - Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument - just last May, so it was exciting to see these dinosaurs enter the literature. More than that, I was glad to see the authors of their description draw out some hypotheses about dinosaur evolution and biogeography. That is the sort of stuff I love - when bizarre new species can also tell us something about the way dinosaurs evolved while also spurring the generation of new hypotheses.

One thing I've gained from doing serious reading about natural history and following paleontology news is to be comfortable with uncertainty, with the idea of provisional understanding that will likely be revised. In what ways have your own studies impacted your general worldview?

I have had a similar reaction. Before I started reading the primary literature for myself, most of what I knew about science came from news reports. Scientific journals seemed to be near-final arbiters of scientific quality where only the best research was printed. Obviously, as [the recent] controversy over "arsenic life" shows, that is not the case - my initial perceptions were a bit too rosy, and publication is just an early step in scientific discussion and debate. You can't really appreciate that until you dig into the technical side of science (although blogs often help make these discussions more accessible to non-specialists). Science is not a matter of obtaining one fact after another until we have collected every bit of data. It is a vibrant process of understanding in which old ideas are constantly being scrutinized just as new ones are being proposed. That is what is so wonderful about it!

At a more personal level, I am enthralled by the perspective of nature that paleontology can provide. To be able to look at an isolated tooth, bone, track, or other fossil and say something meaningful about life which flourished and vanished millions of years ago - I am constantly amazed by that. Paleontologists are familiar with the idea of a "search image" - a sort of concept or archetype you develop that helps you distinguish between rock and the fossils you are after. In the same way, understanding life's history has allowed me to see patterns and connections that I was previously blind to. (For example, why whales swim the way they do - oscillating their tails up and down rather than side-to-side like fishes - is best understood from an evolutionary standpoint and hearkens back to a time when early whales walked on land.) I guess, when you get down to it, I love that paleontology is about stories - narratives not only of life itself, but how we have come to understand it.