Hi, I'm dr. Anthony Fiorello. Real-life
paleontologist at the Perot Museum of
Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas. And I
became a paleontologist because as a
child my grandmother took me to a
Natural History Museum and I got to fall
in love with the giant dinosaur
skeletons and I thought wouldn't that be
cool someday to be able to go out and
dig up one that maybe no one has ever
seen before. I became fascinated with
dinosaurs like I think most people do, in
part because the skeletons you see on
display at museums are so big and those
dinosaurs have such sharp teeth; they're
kind of like the monsters we dream about
at night that chase us in our dreams but
conveniently dinosaurs are also dead,
for the most part. There are a lot of
ways to do work in paleontology. I'm a
field paleontologist because to me, a
paleontologist by definition: I should be
dirty. And so what I do, is I go out and
dig up dinosaur bones because that's
what really gets me excited. But where I
work and have spent so much of my career,
is actually exploring dinosaurs in the
Arctic region. In cold places. They're
cold today and there's certainly cold
back then, maybe not quite as cold as
they are today, but there were certainly
cooler places. They really challenged
what we think we know about dinosaurs as
warm tropical animals. That some
dinosaurs in fact, were very successful
in places where they might have seen
snow. And so I work in a very very remote
area. Very few people go up there. There's
way more mosquitoes than there are
people and that's part of the fun.
The beauty of paleontology is to make
contributions to the profession.
You really just have to be curious and keep
your eyes open when you're outside
somewhere and if you find something
interesting, you'll look at it try to
figure out what it is. My path through
curiosity took me through college and a
lot of college but other people, can just
follow their curiosity with just when they
go outside and walk their dog. You never
know what can be out there, but if you
keep their eyes open and you're always
curious, who knows what you can find.
