Interestingly enough when I came here to
the museum I'd never worked on dinosaurs
before. All my previous work had been on
fossil lizzards and fossil crocodiles and
fossil mammals and that kind of thing,
but
one of the first questions they asked me they said,
if we hire you will you work on
dinosaurs. You know it really combines two of the things
that I love most in the world. One is
being a scientist and the other one is
the ability to go travelling.
technologies really facilitates shorter
field
trips these days. In many cases in
these countries they didn't even have fax
machines so you're lucky if they had a
teletype, so your sending snail mail
back-and-forth
you know you'd get to the airport you
had no idea who was meeting you, or if anybody
was, it  was just
very very difficult to
communicate internationally. I mean, the world's really changed over the last couple of
decades in planning an expedition, I 
mean, today, you know, I can just sit down
in my office, I can have on one screen, I
can have my colleagues, you know,
skyping in from China, on the other
screen we can have Google Maps up, and 
we can say okay, like you know,
here's where were last year
we can put this filter in Google Maps to, you know look at different rock types and that kind of stuff.
And here's where we want to go next, and next, and next. The greatest
fossil discoveries are not the ones which
you expect to find, it's the kind of stuff that
you would never dream,
an animal, you'd find something like that.
There's been a couple times especially
in the
Mongolia expeditions, which it was
just really special, in 1983
 when I found the 
dinosaur egg
 that had the embryo in the inside of
it because
it's the old story that there was
animals which were collected by people
from this institution back in the
'20s
that they found the Oviraptor, a type of carnivorous dinosaur,
next to a nest of eggs, and they'd interpreted
those eggs
as Protoceratops eggs, which is a smal herbivorous dinosaur. They called it Oviraptor 
because they felt the animal had died
or perished while it  was feeding on that
nest,
'cause Oviraptor means egg stealer. when I
found the embryo and
I could clearly see that it was not a Protoceratops embryo it was the
embryo of a carnivorous dinosaur
that was, that was a big thing, I mean that was a very very exciting moment. 
The greatest fossil discoveries are not
the ones which you'd expect to find is the
kind of stuff you would never dream,
an animal, you'd find something like that
and one of those was when I found the Oviraptor sitting on top
of the nest of eggs brooding it. When we
first started getting into the game there
used to be this idea that,
you know, there are birds and there's dinosaurs, the brooding Oviraptor just showed that well
here's another behavior that we think is
stereotypical of modern birds
but has roots that are much deeper
within non-bird dinosaur history. You've
got to be ready to walk into the lab
today, and somebody has come up with
something
to say
everything I've done earlier my career
is all garbage, it's all wrong and move on
and that's a good thing.
