My favourite museum is one most wouldn’t know: the Burpee Museum of Natural Hi story. It’s in Rockford, Illinois, near where grewup and, around the time was becoming interested in dinosaurs, it acquired the best skeleton of a ‘teenage’T. rex ever found. It’s beautiful: as a big as a Jeep, with long, skinny legs, and less scary teeth than the bus-sized adults.
Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall ofthe Dinosaurs is out now in paperback (£9.99, Picador).
The TV stereotype of a digi s some Indiana Jones character brushing sand off bones in the desert, but my most exciting discovery was on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, My colleague and were returning from fieldwork in Duntulm, and noticed a hole in the rock the size of a car tyre. Looking around we saw that these things were everywhere, and it dawned on us that we’d found dinosaur footprints. They were left 170 million years ago by giant long-necked dinosaurs, the Brontosaurus types, as they waded in the shallow water of a lagoon.
When you find a fossil you’re likely to be the first person ever to see it. This is something millions or even tens or hundreds ofmillions ofyears old - a clue to a world that vanished long ago. There’s something exhilarating and also really humbling about that.
Mary Anningwasn’t given the recognition she deservedinher day, butwewould:n!£have the science of palaeontology without her. She had an incredible eye for fossils, and the good fortune to be born - alittle over200years ago -in what is still one ofthe best places in the UK to find them: Lyme Regis in Dorset. Much as she would have done, you can walk along the beach and find bones among the sand and pebbles, or split open a chunk of rock with a hammer or chisel to look for shelled fossils like ammonites.