How Not To Be A Paleontologist

I’m Not Dead Yet!

Hey Everyone! When last we left (way back in January) I was just about to begin Spring Semester 2020, complete with 400+ students across 4 lectures.

Then COVID-19 happened and my university shifted to online-only instruction right around Spring Break. I had 2 weeks to move the last half of my classes online for 400+ students. I had never taught online before either.

Then I finally got a chance to offer a class on dinosaurs that I was going to design and lead. That also got shifted online for our 3-week Maymester session. So I had to build all that content from scratch.

Writing this blog has been a little cathartic for me in terms of letting me flex some non-teaching muscles so I wanted to get back to writing it again. I had originally planned to be doing many more baseball-related posts, but again, COVID-19. But fortunately (or unfortunately) a new topic showed up courtesy of the Discovery Channel.

From the same company that brought you Mermaids: The Body Found, Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives, and Finding Bigfoot, we have “Dino Hunters”….

Side note: yes I am aware that many of these cryptid, pseudoscience shows were broadcast on Animal Planet, but they’re all part of the same company and many of the shows cross over. Likewise, those of us that [still] have cable or satellite, you probably have seen that other Discovery Inc Networks Travel Channel and Destination America are basically totally devoted to cryptids and paranormal TV shows now.

So the network (or family of networks) that inspired a lot of us as kids with things like “Shark Week”, “Walking with Dinosaurs” or TLC’s PaleoWorld (back when TLC = The Learning Channel) have now succumbed to the ratings grab.

So on Friday night, I decided to sit down and see what all the fuss was about.

Low Expectations in, Lower Expectations Out.

To say that I was disappointed assumes I went in with any expectations. The first thing I noticed was how much Discovery used recycled dinosaur animation: many of the cut-aways to show living, breathing dinosaurs were from 2009’s “Clash of the Dinosaurs” and a few clips were from 2001’s “When Dinosaurs Roamed America“. A lot has changed in the 10 years since “Clash” first premiered in terms of how we think dinosaurs looked and moved so it was disappointing that Discovery did not opt to include more up-to-date images.

During a commercial break, Discovery ran a short Discovery Science update/preview; during this clip, the host, previewing next week’s “Dino Hunters” episode commented that the discovery would “rock the world of archaeology.” The popping sounds you heard outside your homes were the heads of every, single, paleontologist’s heads exploding. Archaeology is the study of human history and prehistory; paleontology is the study of fossils of ancient plants & animals. There are major differences between the fields.

Then, one of the main hosts of “Dino Hunters”, Clayton Phipps, explicitly referred to theropod dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus as a “bird-hipped dinosaur”. This is something that is factually wrong and probably one of the first things I and many other instructors emphasize in our classes on dinosaurs. Theropods, like T.rex, are lizard-hipped dinosaurs that belong to the group Saurischia; this group also includes the long-necked Sauropods. The bird-hipped dinosaurs are members of Ornithischia and included horned dinosaurs like Triceratops, the duck-billed dinosaurs like Edmontosaurus, and armored dinosaurs like Ankylosaurs.

Doing Real Damage to Paleontology

The show has made it very clear that dinosaur fossils are business first: the better the fossil the more money you can make off it. This type of for-profit “paleontology” has the potential to do more harm than good. “Dino Hunters” legitimizes those who would exploit fossil resources only for financial gain. It also harms the reputation of real amateur paleontologists who take time to collect responsibly.

Yes, laws protecting fossils in the United States are limited; as of right now only fossils on federal land is protected under the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act (2009). And a recent court case has reinforced the concept that fossils are not minerals allowing ownership of the fossils to be granted to the landowner. However, for-profit “paleontology” serves to keep fossils out of the public trust. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, North America’s largest professional organization dedicated to Vertebrate Paleontology, has made their stances very clear:

Every mention of a new fossil discovery in “Dino Hunters” is accompanied by a cutway to a graphic illustrating the commercial value associated with the skeletal fragment: $150-$300 for a Pachycephalosaurus tooth, $1,000-$2,000 for a raptor claw, or $3,000-$4,000 for the Triceratops horn fragment because, as Aaron Bolan said in the show, “but this horn has to mean something, not just aesthetically…at the end of the day you have to pay your bills.”

And that’s their driving force: making a profit. They are not doing science nor are they contributing to the scientific study of dinosaurs (no matter how much they insist that they sell to museums and universities). Their goal is to get the bones out of the ground as quickly as possible, clean them up, and sell them off. There is no hypothesis test in mind (either in the immediate sense or part of a longer-term study). Moreover nor could there be because these excavators did not preserve the context in which the fossil was found.

The scenes during the excavation of the Triceratops horn fragment were quite disturbing to me because of the haphazard methods being employed. After deciding that a skull might be buried deeper under the dirt, the crew brought in heavy digging equipment to tear apart the hillside. There was no care taken to document the position of the bones. My wife is not a paleontologist, but upon watching this spectacle she declared, “It looks like Heinrich Schliemann on a ranch!”

Excavating any fossil involves quite a bit of CSI-like work: paleontologists meticulously document the lithologic context in which the fossil was found, including: rock type, color, sediment size, sedimentary structures (like ripples or mud-cracks), the orientation of the bones, other fossil remains present around them like plants, teeth, fish, etc. And probably most importantly, the stratigraphic position of the rocks. Sure, the Hell Creek Formation (HCF) may only cover the last million years of the Cretaceous, but it can be over 100m thick in some localities. So, if you find a bone near the “base” of the HCF (say around 0 m) and another near the “top” (around 100 m), you have a lot of rock in between them and thus a lot of geologic time.   

If you do not have this context documented the specimen is literally useless to science. Any new knowledge that could have been gathered to teach us about the past is gone, irrevocably removed from any record. A million-dollar payday is not going to replace it.

Watch or Don’t Watch?

So, should you check out “Dino Hunters?”

In addition to everything I’ve described above, the show plays heavily into the Indiana Jones stereotype focusing on the White-dude-cowboy fossil hunters who are only interested in their next big sale. The fact that Discovery Channel would produce a show that seems to have excluded actual paleontologists further demonstrates how far they have fallen as a network. They no longer teach, they entertain.

Paleontology is unique because it is one of only a few science disciplines that everyone wants to join at some point in their lives; while some grow out of this “phase” others of us linger and try to make a career out of it. Those of us that have chosen the career path do so because we’re curious about a world that no longer exists but that we can bring back to life. We do so because we want pass that information onto the public; and many of us do working as teachers and communicators. And we can only do all of that if fossils are not sold to the highest bidder to be locked away by a private collector.

While others may suggest you avoid this show to further avoid legitimizing what it promotes, part of me feels it may do more good to hold it up as an example of what it means to not be a paleontologist.