BA: Were you interested in science
as a child?
GE: Yes, I grew up around wildlife
and science. I loved dinosaurs, just like
any little kid, and I had a rock and fossil
collection. When I was very young, my
family even had a pet polar bear and
bobcat for a short period.
BA: Did you just say you had a pet
polar bear?
GE: My father was a wildlife biol-
ogist and 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.
BA: How did you get started as
a paleontologist?
GE: 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 get-
ting rained on in Seattle, took to heart
what my [undergraduate] paleontology
professor had said and signed up for the
GRE. I was accepted into the biology
graduate program at Montana State Uni-
versity 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.
BA: Why were you interested in
teeth specifically?
GE: As a kid, I used to help my dad
catch bears. He would age them using
cementum rings in their teeth, and he
taught me the technique. Then when I
was an undergraduate, I got a job work-
ing up in Alaska in the summers of 1984
and 1985, studying salmon runs in rivers
and working from a fishing research
boat in Bristol Bay. We’d catch salmon
and age them from otoliths — their ear
bones. Studying growth lines in teeth
hadn’t been done much in paleontology.
So that’s what I wanted to study at Jack’s
lab, in dinosaurs, specifically. I guess I’ve
become a dino dentist; I just have this
obsession with teeth!BA: You aged Sue, the T. rex at the Field
Museum in Chicago, using growth
lines in the skeleton. What was that
experience like?
GE: Doing research on rare fossils feels
like dancing on a high wire. You’ve talked
somebody into letting you do something
that is kind of risky, so it has to pay off.
I knew, in theory, it could work, but if I
screwed up, my reputation was on the
line. I’d be famous for failure — it’d be
my Waterloo.BA: At first, nobody thought you
could age a T. rex, right?
GE: People thought you could never
age T. rex because their bones get hollow
as they grow older; the bones are also
remodeled during life, so you can’t see
the growth lines anymore. It is sort of like
trying to age a tree that has been hollowed
out and also eaten up by wood-bor-
ing beetles.
I went to visit the Field Museum, and
as I was looking at Sue and other tyran-
nosaurs, I realized that some of the solid
bones, like the pubis of the hip bone and
the fibula, on the side of the shin, had
all of the growth lines intact. I asked the
Field Museum if I could cut up some of
these bones that hadn’t been used in the
mount. They stewed about it for awhile,
then finally said I could do it. That’s how
I got ahold of the $8.36-million dinosaur.
Ultimately, I aged Sue at 28.BA: Was her age surprising?
GE: When I embarked on this research,
no one really knew how long giant dino-
saurs lived. Sue is the largest-known*VMGOWSR WIIR LIVI HMK
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