AN INTERVIEW WITH DR. GREGORY M. ERICKSON, FULL-TIME PROFESSIONAL DINOSAUR PALEONTOLOGIST
At Imagine Exhibitions, we are honored to work with leading subject matter experts to develop our portfolio of entertaining, educational traveling exhibitions. These partners ensure that our exhibitions are developed with academic rigor, vetted with educational goals in mind, and deliver the world’s most incredible experiences to consumers worldwide. Among those partners is Dr. Gregory M. Erickson, faculty at Florida State University and one of only 150 full-time professional dinosaur paleontologists in the world!
Dr. Erickson’s research focuses primarily on dinosaur growth, life history, physiology, behavior, and feeding biomechanics. He has published over 100 scientific papers and has participated in over 50 expeditions, including trips to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, Romania, and the Alaskan Arctic. Dr. Erickson holds research appointments with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, The Field Museum in Chicago, and University of Alaska’s Museum of the North in Fairbanks, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a National Geographic Explorer.
We recently sat down with Dr. Erickson to discuss his background, interests, and hopes for the visitors who enjoy his exhibitions.
Were you interested in science as a child?
Yes, I grew up around wildlife and science as my father was a wildlife biologist and professor. I loved dinosaurs, just like any little kid, and I had a rock and fossil collection. But I was also interested in animals. When I was very young, my family even had a pet polar bear and bobcat for a short period.
Did you just say you had a pet polar bear?
My father was the regional director for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Anchorage. He worked with a chemist and discovered how it was possible to raise orphaned bear cubs by feeding them cow’s milk with the addition of the right enzymes. So, he’d raise bear cubs from mothers that had been killed in the wild, or from captive animals that rejected their young. We had a polar bear named Snowflake at our house for about six months until it destroyed the kitchen and my mom said we had to find it a new home. It eventually went to a zoo in Canada. I was extremely jealous of Snowflake as a child. Visitors wanted to play with the bear and not me!
How did you get started as a paleontologist?
I was a construction worker for about a year after graduating college. The money was good, but I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. One day I got tired of getting rained on in Seattle, took to heart what my [undergraduate] paleontology professor had said that I had potential to be a dinosaur paleontologist and signed up to take the GRE. I was accepted into the biology graduate program at Montana State University in Bozeman, with Jack Horner as my advisor. Jack is the famous dinosaur paleontologist after whom the character Alan Grant from “Jurassic Park” was modeled. Jack — jokingly, I think — intimated that he accepted me less for my ideas and more because I knew how to use a shovel.
Fun Fact! Paleontologist Jack Horner, who was paleontological consultant for the Jurassic Park films, was consultant for the design of the dinosaurs and their film-inspired environments for Imagine Exhibitions’ past exhibition that premiered in 2016, Jurassic World.
You aged Sue, the T. rex at the Field Museum in Chicago, at 28 years old using the growth lines in the skeleton. Did you find her age surprising?
When I embarked on this research, no one really knew how long giant dinosaurs lived. Sue is the largest-known T. rex and is really beat up, so people thought she could be anywhere from 100 to 200 years old. I was stunned to find she was so young. I often say T. rex was the James Dean of dinosaurs; it lived fast and died young.
What are some of the big unanswered questions in dinosaur biology?
We’ve been stymied trying to figure out how to sex dinosaurs because we can’t do it from just looking at skeletons. There have been a few theories that didn’t pan out or are still on trial. A few years ago, a paper came out saying you could look at the tailbone to determine sex, which would be shorter in females relative to males, so she could pass the eggs. But I did a study with alligators, showing that that did not work; males and females showed the same variation. So, that’s one of the biggest mysteries — not knowing the sex of an animal.
The second biggest question is how they got so big. And the third is, why aren’t they around anymore? I’ve spent my career trying to figure out anything I can learn from bones and teeth, and what they can tell you about biology. I always try to find something in a modern animal that I can carry over to paleontology, like the replacement rates for teeth or how they grew from growth lines in their bones. It’s like forensic science: We are very limited by what material is in front of us. Many questions are intractable given what we have to work with.
You’ve partnered with us to create shows that are accessible and educational to children of all ages. Why is communicating science, particularly to kids, important to you?
Dinosaurs are often children’s first introduction into science, and it’s actually an important field in that sense. It’s dinosaur paleontology’s most redeeming quality, in my opinion. When I talk to kids, I don’t tell them that we already know everything about dinosaurs. The problem with that message is you’re telling kids that everything has been done and there is nothing for a kid to do if they grow up and want to be a paleontologist. The bottom line is that we know hardly anything about dinosaurs relative to animals that live today.
What I try to do when talking to kids is get them excited about the scientific method. I teach them how we figured something out. I find that kids are more excited about how we learned something, rather than what we learned. I think those are a good life skills for young people to ask for the data in support of things they are told.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on dinosaurs that thrived in the Arctic. Were they year-round denizens in an environment that was lightless and cold with snowy conditions or did they migrate there during the warm seasons and return to lower latitudes as winter set in? My lab is also working with engineers to develop novel materials based on dinosaur tooth microstructure for applications in industry and aerospace.
What is your favorite dinosaur?
I don’t really have one. All animals be them extinct or extant are amazing to me — I think slugs are cool. As with any dinosaur paleontologist, I frequently get asked what my favorite dinosaur is? I jokingly answer it is Barney the purple dinosaur from a popular kid’s show or Dino from the Flintstones. Levity aside, based on my many papers, you would expect me to say T. rex the 15,000 lb roadrunner from Hell (I’m paraphrasing something Dr. Robert Bakker said many years ago), but I actually have to admit… I am enamored with duck-billed dinosaurs. They have amazing 1,400 tooth dentitions that wore to grinding pavements like horses. I spend much of my time trying to figure out how their teeth worked and what they did with them.
What do you enjoy most about collaborating on exhibitions?
I am an educator at heart that occasionally does science. I see exhibitions as a springboard to teach the masses about the scientific method. Peoples’ inherent interest in dinosaurs provides an excellent vehicle to spread the word.
What do you hope visitors take away from your exhibitions?
I hope that something we present will instill an interest in the sciences. I believe that learning is best achieved through entertainment.
What are you finding most interesting in your work on Ice Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Explorer? What are some differentiators on these two new exhibitions for visitors?
I am very excited to work on these projects. The Ice Dinosaurs exhibit will paint a new picture for people about what dinosaurs were really like. They lived in frigid extremes only seen today in warm-blooded birds and mammals. They didn’t just live in tropical environments. Our data suggests they were clearly warm-blooded, and non-migratory cold weather denizens. How they pulled that off is the next question? I don’t think we will answer this in my lifetime, leaving fertile ground for budding your future paleontologists. Dinosaur Explorer is fun for me because I am an anatomist/physiologist by training. I see it as a fun way to learn about dinosaurs while at the same time learning about ourselves.
Contact us today to learn more about booking one of our dinosaur exhibitions for your venue!
Exhibitions in collaboration with Dr. Erickson include:
Dino Safari Drive Thru
Dino Safari Walk Thru
Dinosaurs Around the World
Dinosaurs Around the World: The Great Outdoors
Dinosaur Explorer
Ice Dinosaurs