
Dinosaur “mummies” couldn’t have been further from my mind as I trudged up a grassy knoll on the Zerbst Ranch in east-central Wyoming, followed by University of Chicago undergraduates on a field trip linked to my “Dinosaur Science” course.
As a university professor, I realized early that to understand paleontology, students would need to see first-hand where fossils are born. And that field experience had to be real, a place I wanted to be – somewhere where we had a shot at discovery.