Neat anecdote

The other week I was being set up for a new assignment with In Business magazine when I received a call from my editor, and he had been tipped off that I like dinosaurs. And it just so happened that they were interested in assigning me the "Dinosauria" human interest piece at the Detroit Zoo - hence why I was at the zoo the other day.


One of the features at Dinosauria is an actual paleontologist named "Paleo Joe" or, by his parents, Joe Kchodl. Joe happens to be an expert on marine invertebrates, particularly the trilobite, but recently he has helped uncover an enormous bonebed in Utah that has been unearthing a tremendous amount of animals. And I've had the chance to interview him. That's cool.

The trilobites are my area of expertise, however since I discovered the camarasaurus I’ve been doing a great deal of study on him, so kind of like a dual specialty. [...] And we actually in that one site last year and this year discovered an apatasaurus, a brachiosaurus, barosaurus, all of those are sauropods, in one formation. To find that many sauropods in one location within maybe about 100 yards of each other, that tells us that area back them must have been fairly decent as far as vegetation goes, a great habitat for them. Otherwise, these guys ate tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of food. Well, to have that many in one location, seems to tell us that the area was quite hospitable to sauropods. [...] [They're from] the Jurassic and middle-Jurassic period, and we actually have found an allosaurus as well, and we found a carnotaurus, too. So we do have some meat-eaters that were in the area, and we believe we’ve found a stegosaurus, as well. It’s a fantastic site, it’s going to be a rich dinosaur national site in Utah. It’s the Hanksville Burpee site.

Pretty neat, eh? I got to interview a straight-up paleontologist, rather serendipitously, while working on another project.