Working with Dinosaurs - A Q&A with Dr. Brian Curtice, Paleontologist, Fossil Crates
At Dinosaur Trips, we’re not just interested in dinosaurs and prehistoric life, we’re also interested in the history of paleontology, the people who work in dinosaur museums, and the folks across generations who have shaped our understanding and appreciation for prehistoric life, as well as the incredible adventures that are tied to some of the most exciting discoveries in paleontology history.
Which begs the question: How do you get one of these dinosaur jobs anyway?
To learn more, Dinosaur Trips founder & director Zach Vanasse is chatting with people from all across the dinosaur research spectrum to learn more about what it’s like working in this riveting field.
For this edition of ‘Working With Dinosaurs,’ Zach got to talk to Dr. Brian Curtice, paleontologist, founder of Fossil Crates, and Dinosaur Trips’ paleo expert for our expeditions into the depths of Arizona & California and Utah & Colorado for spring 2024.
Dinosaur Trips and our guests will get to explore these undeniable paleo-destinations with Dr. Brian Curtice’s unique access and unimpeachable expertise leading the way to unprecedented opportunities way beyond the reach of the general public.
Check out the video – or read the Q&A below – as Dinosaur Trips’ founder and director Zach Vanasse catches up with Dr. BC for an engaging conversation in which Dr. BC shares his personal journey, unveils the memories and moments that fueled his passion for unlocking the mysteries of prehistoric life, and reveals why he believes paleontology is not just a scientific field, but an adventure that captivates the imagination of everyone.
This Q&A based on the video interview with Dr. Brian Curtice featured above has been edited for clarity.
Zach Vanasse: Alright, welcome back. Yet another video with our paleo expert, the one, the only; Dr. Brian Curtice. Dr. BC of Fossil Crates. Good to have you back, Brian. If you haven’t seen our other two videos, check those out because those take us through our two trips in the U. S. in the spring of 2024.
We’ve got ‘Route 66 Million Years Ago,’ our exploration of California and Arizona, and we’ve got ‘Red Rocks & Raptors’ that’s our Utah and Colorado trips.
But I also wanted to talk a little bit about Dr. BC himself.
You’re our paleo leader on this. You’re the guy unlocking all the special rooms for us, opening up the drawers that other people don’t get access to.
So we’ve charted the route that we’ll be taking for both those experiences with you. Let’s now chart the route of your experience into paleontology. How did you become Dr. BC, the founder of Fossil Crates, the guy who has all of this access for us?
I’m going to ask you the same question and get this interview going the same way I do with everybody that I’m talking to for our Working With Dinosaurs feature here:
Where did you first fall in love with dinosaurs? Where did this start for you?
Dr. Brian Curtice : My parents would tell you; as a fetus.
There’s seemingly never a time that I wasn’t enamored, in some capacity, with dinosaurs. They were ubiquitous with every toy I had. And back in the ‘70s, there weren’t a lot of dinosaur toys, but I seemed to have had one of every one of them. In books, in anything I could get my hands on. The internet didn’t exist, so I grew up in libraries and on interlibrary loan.
It was incredible how I played with dinosaurs and thought about them and read everything I could. There was no YouTube. Documentaries were few and far between. So I had to just get my fix however I could via the technology that was available at the time. And then I also discovered computers.
So I was a self taught programmer. I loved computing and I wasn’t sure I wanted to chase paleo, but I also thought it’d be fun to play with computers.
And, ultimately, various things happened. I went to undergrad at Arizona State and was a physical anthropology major because they had no dinosaurs, and computer science and I weren’t going to ultimately work out.
I started my career as just a typical physical anthro. I’m learning about human bones, human anatomy. But you also get to play with non-human bones because you have to know what you found isn’t human. How do you know what bone this belongs to? And that’s comparative morphology, comparative osteology.
And then, in 1993 was my first dinosaur dig. I went up to Montana and said, “Wow!”
I worked construction throughout my high school and college years, so that translated quite nicely into paleontology. I knew how to use all the heavy equipment. I knew how to use all the smaller equipment. And I come in out of the blue.
So that was really great. Graduate program, a master’s in geology at Brigham Young University. So that was an interesting experience. A wonderful place. I’m not LDS, but they opened their hearts and kindness to me and I had a wonderful 23 months. I lived, what I calculated up, I lived 10 months in a tent during that time, in various dinosaur quarries, digging, constantly digging dinosaurs.
So it was absolutely awesome. Worked all over the Jurassic and Cretaceous Southwest. Studied sauropods; the long neck, long tailed animals. And then went on and started a Ph. D. at SUNY at Stony Brook in human gross anatomy – emphasis on gross – and got a Ph.D, then went back and got a Ph. D. in 2014, so fairly recently, in educational technology.
I still couldn’t leave tech alone. And I wanted to understand where the educational system came from and how this all works together. So I’ve got a fairly diverse background.
Then I worked in corporate America for a number of years. First, banging the phones and then working at a telecenter, a contact center for selling computers.
So I did get my computer fix. I got deep into technology. I was right around during the dot-com era. The Y2K and dot-com had a great, great experience playing with technology, learning how to use it, learning how to sell it, how it’s deployed. Then, during COVID, I was working at the Arizona Museum of Natural History when it closed, and every museum closed.
I said, “Uh oh. This is bad,” because the whole time I’ve been researching sauropods. So, with Dr. Christy Lopez and the folks at Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center – Jacob Jett and Michael Trebold – plus a private equity firm called AZ Crown, we got together and said, well, let’s bring the museum home.
If you don’t want people to know it’s your product, that’s cool. But we work with museums. And now we sell items from all over the world. We’re adding product continuously and a percentage of every sale goes back to research. We give it to the museum so they can go find new stuff and perpetuate the cycle, because there’s just not enough funding in paleontology.
Bringing the Museum Home: The Creation of Fossil Crates
So we created Fossil Crates, which is, as you see behind me, some of our work. Teeth, claws, jaws, and casts. I knew where all the bodies were at. I called all my buddies and said, look, I can help you. We’ll give you a royalty in exchange for allowing us to sell your product.
Since then we’ve branched out. We have a virtual reality T. rex that we have for exhibits. We got into the exhibit space with Express Exhibits. I run a podcast twice a month where I bring on paleontologists called Fossil Crates Live. Used to be called Paleo Portals. And that’s where I bring on people like me and we chat for an hour and you get the real time access to them.
I’m giving you way more life story than you probably were looking for. But the punchline is; I have had a very squiggly line in paleo, but the one thing, or the two things that remain true, I have continued to research regardless of when I was full time corporate America. All of my vacation days were spent in museums and I have kept the network alive.
I’ve constantly kept in touch with paleontologists. Always trying to meet new ones, keeping the old relationships strong, being helpful, sharing information. And now I work with the next generation. There is a crop of paleontologists coming up today in the grad schools that are amazing. They’re taking technology and they’re putting it all together and I’m delighted to be able to help those folks out.
You’ve given me a lot that we need to unpack there across your journey.
I have found that for a lot of the folks I’ve talked to in the realm of paleontology – whether they’re paleontologists themselves, or researchers, or educators – and it seems that they’re always bringing all these different pieces to [their paleontology journey]. That there’s really no straightforward road into paleontology from anyone that I’ve spoken to.
A lot of people did something along the same lines you did, which was start down one track and then paleontology kind of grabbed them. Or started down the paleontology track and got distracted off it before coming back to it.
Or, in cases like me,where I’m not a paleontologist by any stretch of any imagination – the last science class I took was still back in high school and I was struggling with it, which was one of the reasons I didn’t become a paleontologist – but I have found my way into a world where I get to work with paleontologists, work with dinosaurs, get this incredible access thanks to people like you as we do these things. So there’s all these different routes into the world around paleontology.
And some people are paleontologists in the most academic sense of the word, while other folks might have a regular day job, but come dig season, they’re enthusiastic to get out there and join some of these digs. Or there’s people who are just on the periphery and dip back in every once in a while.
So when I started to create Dinosaur Trips – actually before I created Dinosaur Trips and I first had this idea that perhaps I could create this company – I started by seeing if anyone was doing something like Dinosaur Trips out there. I found out that no, nobody was doing dinosaur trips.
So that was step one. And so then I thought; “Okay, maybe I can make this travel company happen.”
But first I needed to see what the world was like around paleontology. How accessible was it? Who should I be following? Who should I be talking to, to get into these areas? And Fossil Crates was one of the first things that I stumbled upon through my social media account.
I saw what you guys were doing and I saw this opportunity that you’re creating to make paleontology accessible to those of us who are just the hobbyists, just the nerds who enjoy the idea of it. You make it something tangible. You take it down from the ivory tower of academia that seems so inaccessible to people.
So that was my first kind of introduction to what you were doing. And I was like, “Okay, this is an interesting company. Let’s see who the folks are behind it.”
I think I first got in contact because we like to really be able to provide a whole bunch of other stuff, beyond the trips themselves, to our guests. I think I reached out being like, “These products you’re making, these crates, these fossil crates, they’re pretty cool! You know, I think they could be a great gift for our guests at the end of the tour.”
You were immediately like, “Oh man, dinosaur trips are something I’ve had in the back of my mind. This is a realm to be explored.”
And a lot of paleontologists I have talked to have said; “We saw this as something that could happen and that maybe this should exist.” But nobody had the wherewithal to put A and B together, I guess.
Anyway, when I finally got talking to you and we started having these conversations about what we could do together, I saw that, okay, this is somebody who’s really aligned with what I want to do in order to bring paleontology to the average person.
You know, if you’re a big fan of any of these many specimens, [thanks to Fossil Crates], you can get that raptor claw like you’ve always been dreaming about since you saw it in Jurassic Park. Or you can put that skull on your desk to have that tangible something at home.
So I see your role as paleo leader for these trips with Dinosaur Trips in May simply as an extension of that desire to make paleontology and dinosaurs accessible to anybody.
I had never been on social media. I had no idea what I was doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing. So I go to Instagram and I max out the characters on my post ever since. I don’t know why they limit you, but they do. And Twitter’s the worst.
So I realized, originally it was just going to be this real hardcore channel. I’m going to show you pictures of bones, and I’m going to tell you all these super presegopophysiolaminar intricacies, and you’re going to love it.
And, I realized that nobody really cared about that, but what they did like is when I showed them museum specimens. When I showed them things on display.
It’s tough to show behind the scenes because museums don’t want people to know for a variety of reasons, none of which I agree with.
So now Fossil Crates, on the social media side, shares a lot of just the front end [museum fossils] that we see. I’m Gandalf the gray. I hit 70-plus museums a year. And most people, if they hit seven in a year, it was an epic year. That was my Tuesday. So as a result, the thought process was; “Well, let’s share all these museums. I don’t charge for the services.” I am so honored to share these smaller museums that no one even knows exists.
Democratizing Paleontology
So I really wanted to democratize paleontology in that sense. Showcase what’s out there. Let people know via the Paleo Portals [now Fossil Crates Live], how you become a paleontologist. I’m so happy with the outcome of that project. It makes us no money, and it’s a lot of time. But it’s a labor of love because I have had multiple people who’ve joined us have gone on to either go to a school; a grad school, an undergrad, or work in a museum as a docent, a curator, a preparator. And because I know so many people, I can put them in touch with other folks.
So I feel like I’m helping out and paying it forward and also giving it back to the people that helped me.
So I love Dinosaur Trips. When we chatted, I saw; here’s a gentleman in Zach who knows what he’s doing and you hit it on the head. We thought this idea is not novel. It’s always about execution
I mean, [people in] paleo, we live in tents. We sleep on the ground. We don’t shower. Food is a cold can of beans. We’re not exactly the most welcoming. I want to go on a vacation and sleep in my backyard where it’s cold and hot and dangerous and miserable.
[Dinosaur Trips] shows up with the solution to all of that. I’m like, wow, this is chocolate and coconut (since I like Mound Bars).
Yeah, paleontology can lack the hospitality element a little bit. So hopefully that’s what I’m bringing to the whole thing.
But I want to talk more about Fossil Crates and what you’ve been doing there. First of all, I don’t think we’ve properly got into what it is that you do at Fossil Crates. So explain that a little bit. To me it’s a merging of artistry and technology. This isn’t some half-ass recreation. These are awesome, really detailed, pretty much scientific specimens.
So [at Fossil Crates] we shoot for research grade. By that I mean, the specimens we offer in almost every case are three dimensional scans or they are exact molds of the original material.
And that is important to me as a researcher. So people have used our specimens for research in a pinch. If you can’t go get your hands on a T. rex claw, well, we’ve got a cast. If you’re looking for that Utahraptor killing claw, but you can’t make it to Utah, well, we’ve got them and they’re inexpensive for what you get. They’re way inexpensive.
And the artistry comes in because I went and gathered a stable of young artists. Folks who, in many cases, this was the first time they’d been paid for their artwork. And so I commissioned artwork. So every crate has artwork in it and it has an info sheet on the animal that I write personally.
But we’ve discovered our bestsellers have quickly become these (showing a replica skull). And with good reason.
This skull behind me is one of our products. We got the laser scans working with Dr. David Kraus. He’s the Madagascar paleontologist who allowed us to three-dimensionally-scan and make a polyresin 3D print of that particular skull.
And then we pay them a large royalty to go give back to the people.
Well not everyone has $4,000 and space for a life-size replica skull. But most people have room for [the scaled down] Majungasaurus skull. We took the exact file, and thanks to modern technology, we’re able to push a few buttons – well it’s more than push a few buttons – but we get an exact one-to-three-and-a-half scale replica.
So it’s a scale model of the animal behind us. It’s the same bones, just shrunk down. I know firsthand personally of Tyrannosaur researchers who have taken our Tufts-Love skull, of which 100 percent of the bones were found, and they are doing principal component analysis, finite element analyses, off of a scan. That terrifies me on one level. But, it’s easier and it’s directionally correct as they’re first into their study. So before they commit all this time, money and energy, they’ll use our scale products.
And here’s, here’s one of my favorites; the direwolves. This thing is cool looking. And we’ve got Smilodon. Go to our website, we were adding three more February 1st; Majungasaurus, which you just saw. And then you’ve heard it here first; Megacerops, which is the old Brontotherium, the thunder beast with the cool horns. And a new species of Mosasaurus.
And we then also provide individually. So you don’t have to buy a crate for a number of our items we sell, and they still come with the same artwork, the same information sheet.
Because to us, it’s that educational component that’s important. We’re ClassWallet certified. So if you have an Empowerment Scholarship Account for your state, it’s likely you can procure the product via your state vehicle. Because my educational technology background allowed me to use academic pedagogy and paradigms of learning, and apply that in the information that we provide. So we’re kind of a one-stop shop. We also provide services for academics, teachers, and libraries who have presentations; we call them educrates.
We’ll make customized crates, depending on your particular geography or the thing you’re trying to teach to someone. We are truly a multifaceted company that is growing. And we’ve now got into tech. Heck, we’re playing with CT scanning. So we’re all over the place and all in a good way, because it all comes back to making it so it’s not so erudite.
And then we go out and do social events. I was in Texas a couple weeks ago and we did an event where we laid out a bunch of dinosaur bones at a restaurant. Before that I was at a couple schools. So we bop around and wherever we go, we try to interact with the public. We try to share our love of paleo and our enthusiasm for paleo because dinosaurs are for everyone.
That’s the most terrifying thing to me about leading Dinosaur Trips, particularly our family adventures! These kids are all coming in armed with way more information than I have as a 39-year-old. Nine-year-old me had way more [knowledge about dinosaurs] than I do now. Just the fact that I’m out here working with paleontologists every day and thinking about dinosaurs at all times, and my brain still can’t pack in what it did when I was a kid and I was just absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs. It’s crazy.
I mean I’m sure there’s some people out there who have just absolutely no interest in dinosaurs whatsoever, they couldn’t care less. Yeah, there’s going to be those folks, but you don’t meet them very often.
But I’ve noticed that since I started this company, when people ask what I’m up to and I tell them about Dinosaur Trips – and I’m sure you’ve seen this with Fossil Crates – everyone’s just like, “Oh man, that is cool.”
And this isn’t somebody who’s necessarily been to a dinosaur museum, maybe ever in their life. Or if they have, it was as part of some other experience. They’ve probably watched some of the Jurassic movies, but dinosaurs are not something they spend any time really thinking about beyond kind of how they exist in our pop culture around us.
But when I talk about these trip experiences or I talk about the museums that we’ve gone to – or especially when I talk about getting access to digs like we’re doing again this summer up in Alberta – it’s just something people can’t help but get excited about. It’s something that, like you said, that unlocks from your childhood. There’s an enthusiasm. Dinosaurs are cool. They’re just cool. I think the size is a contributor to it. The danger – but as you say, not a danger to us in any way anymore – but it sparks the imagination. So for people who are kind of on the fence and asking: “Is a Dinosaur Trips for me or not?” I just say; it is. It is going to be for you.
Watch what happens when you get on these trips. What I’ve seen happen when we’ve done them thus far is you’ve usually got your dino enthusiast. Your diehard, all those terms that you were just talking about. The nerd who’s kind of convinced the partner, the parent, or the friend to come along with me on this adventure. And they say “Alright, I’ll come along. We’re gonna do some horseback riding, we’ll do some caving, we’ll see the Grand Canyon, we’ll go to Universal Studios, you know, whatever it is that you use to bring that person along. By the end of the trip, it’s the person who didn’t come in with the excitement about paleontology who has their mind blown in a way where they’re just like, “Oh man, can I get that book now? Like, I’ve got to go deeper on this. I didn’t know anything We’re talking about a Ceratopsian. What is that? I don’t know.”
But now they’re all in on it. They can’t believe this kind of world that’s been unlocked for them. And that’s what’s really fun is that the dinosaur enthusiasts are obviously gonna have a great time. But the other people just kind of get caught up in everything that can be really fun about dinosaurs.
And yeah, it’s nerdy. So are comic books and Marvel has just had a heck of a run in that department. There’s a lot of room in whatever nerdom that you’re, that you’re in for this big tent.
And yes, I’ve seen it on Twitter in particular, where there’s certainly some gatekeeping and fights can happen. As happens in any hardcore fan community. I mean you’re talking about comparing it to sports fandom, there’s nowhere worse than being on sports Twitter. I’m a huge sports fan, but that’s a terrible place to be sometimes. So, yes, arguments happen.
But from the level of enthusiasm that you find, I’ve been excited to get to join the community surrounding paleontology. You meet a lot of people who just find a passion in this, find excitement in this, and are bringing more people into it.
And you mentioned sports. What I find fascinating with sports is, at the end of the argument, you can just point to the scoreboard. Whether or not my team was better than your team; that team won. And the ultimate outcome is who’s the champion of that year. Yeah, yeah, you’ve got ‘who was jobbed by the ref and all that stuff. But [at the end of the day], that team won.
In paleo, what I love about it is, there is almost never a definitive 100 per cent final answer. It can be overturned by a new find, by a new specimen, at any time. In Arizona, when Zuniceratops was found, oh my goodness, that changed the ceratopsian world. And nobody knew it was coming.
The Constant Evolution of Dinosaur Research
It’s called research. That means to search again, if you think about what the word means. It causes everyone to go and re-search the areas that they already thought they knew. And with the dinosaur knowledge changing so rapidly, kids come in and they know way more than their parents because 20 per cent of the parents’ information is no longer considered valid.The names have changed, the thoughts have changed.
So the kids are empowered. What I love about the youth is they come in because they’ve watched a video on something. And I get to show them that information is not correct. Or it’s not as cut and dried as that particular video would make you think. And I hope when they leave they can still believe what they’d like, but they are open to the fact that the scientific method. And it causes them to think and question and ponder.
I think that’s why paleo leads to so many [people becoming] scientists. For the people that love dinosaurs, as you start off and you start realizing, wait, it’s not, the longest and that’s the heaviest. As you start reading into it and you get a little older, you’re like, wow, there’s so many variables involved, that’s too many variables. I’m out. But I loved the length, and I loved the math, so now I’m an engineer.
Right. Yeah, it’s constantly evolving. There’s always something new to learn, discover, unpack. You know, you don’t, you don’t get that necessarily in certain other parts of fandom, especially ones that are obsessed with canon, which many fandoms are.
I mean, [paleontology] is one fandom or passion where you have to accept the opposite. I think that one of the things that’s so great about getting into paleontology and experiencing it is that it presents this other way of looking at the world to folks. Whether kids, or even adults; it presents the idea that reconsidering things as you learn more is important.
And all science does that, but I think there’s something about dinosaurs that just makes it feel a little more tangible than, you know, say chemistry or physics or something that is much more conceptual based.
But yeah, this idea that as you’re presented with new information you can recontextualize everything around you, I think it’s a really healthy thing and it’s something that I find really fun about paleontology.
That path of paleontology is forcing people to look at things in that way. I mean, when I was a kid, we still didn’t know what killed the dinosaurs. It was all theory. And for a long time now it’s been widely accepted that it was an asteroid. But now there’s even thinking that oh maybe it wasn’t entirely that.. Maybe they were on the downside before.
So you’ve got to constantly be open to new information coming in and changing your worldview. And yeah, I know there are people in paleontology who are pretty locked in, maybe because they made some discovery and are holding on to it fast, like any other thing, but in the overall general spirit of the thing is we’re always pushing forward. We’re always changing what we know. And so you never get sick of it. There’s always something new. This isn’t something where you’re going to go, “Oh, got to the end of dinosaurs. What’s next for me to learn, you know?”
Yes, the newness and the willingness to adapt to new technology.
So paleo is so broad, you hit upon it earlier. What is paleontology? What does a paleontologist do? Well, what do you wanna do? You can define what you do. There’s so many options. You have the person that goes and finds the fossils. You’ve got the collector specialist. You’ve got the preparation specialist. You have the curation that keeps it safe for everyone down the line.
Then you have the individual who studies the fossils and figures out what it is. What is it? What bone is it? What does it belong to? Can we CT scan it and look and see inside it and look at all the nerves in the skull? Do we do histology where we cut it up and we determine how old it is?
Can we look at pathologies? Does it have a disease of some sort? Can we look at functional mechanics, biomechanics, functional morphology? The list of things that you can do to any one bone goes on and on. And so, as a person who does not just have 100 per cent interest in dinosaurs, you have other interests that you can bring to the table; databases, mapping, drone flights, photography, 3D scanning, and that’s the technology alone.
Paleo is a discipline that embraces tech better than almost any discipline that I’ve ever been around. Which means the audience that we draw in is enormous. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a museum or somewhere and a guy walks up and goes; “You know, I’m a drone pilot and I’m looking to try to find dinosaurs with drones. Or I use fluorescence up there.”
I have a mighty fluorescent light now because I met a guy who is a gemologist that showed me how bones can fluoresce and what that can conceivably mean. I have a Geiger counter, because there was a hobby radiation detector, and lots of the bones I study are radioactive, so I carry one now. And we’ll take it with us on our Dinosaur Trips, just to see, is this hot or not, in a different sense than you might think.
Oh man, that’s good. I mean, we could talk about all of this forever and ever – and if you want that, then join us on these trips, because these are the conversations we’re going to be having the whole way.
We’ll go deep into the cups!
But following some of the great science communicators who are working in the paleontology space, you see that they are always applying these tools from other sciences and other research to paleontology in ways that nobody had really thought of.
And that’s because, to some degree, dinosaur research is really limited. There’s only so many paleontologists. There’s only so many specimens that you can be interacting with at any point. There’s tons that are just sitting in drawers and boxes and waiting to be revisited in different ways. So every time you come back to paleontology as an outside hobbyist, there’s going to be revelations that you won’t believe that have happened.
And it seems like, to me, as an outsider, that we’re certainly in a Golden Age of Paleontology for a variety of reasons. One: Jurassic Park. I think that kicked off a generation of people who are now kind of around my age and younger who have been watching the films and really decided to go into paleontology. So there’s a lot of bright minds in that field now. The technology. The expansion in China, from what it once was for paleontology has really given us a lot more specimens.
There’s no shortage of where we can go for Dinosaur Trips, but also where we can go in thinking about dinosaurs, exploring dinosaurs, and learning about dinosaurs. We’re always scratching the surface in a kind of a literal way.
Well played. And you reminded me of something that happened to me just yesterday. I emailed a paleo buddy of mine saying, “Hey, how come I can’t find a list of the minimum and maximum number of cervical vertebrae present in fish and amphibians and snakes?: And he’s like, “Yeah, it’s a good question.”
[Even for] modern animals, things that you think you should just be able to go to a ChatGPT and say, “What’s the maximum number of vertebrae in extant Lacertilia? And it looks at me and says; 400. I’m like, “What are you talking about? That’s a snake.” So I looked through the textbooks. It’s just not there.
I was an author on a paper that involves Sariema, which is a kind of bird that lives in Argentina and Brazil. It’s a bird and it has a killing claw like a Velociraptor. And it grabs snakes and throws them, and it’s a beautiful bird. It’s really awesome. It turns out there’s almost no published literature on this. This is an animal that if you go to Argentina, you can see it, and yet no one is studying it. And so you realize that there is so much work to be done in modern animals. So as a paleontologist, you get to go play at zoos and observe animals. It’s truly a discipline that you can take anywhere you want to go.
And with Dinosaur Trips, we’re going to emphasize as we go places, the different technologies, the different mechanical practices, the different opportunities that exist. And we’ll go as deep into the administrivia and academic literature as the guests would like, but we’ll also keep it up at the larger connections. We’ll keep it to be whatever the group wants to talk about and what the individuals want to chat about.
Well, obviously, there’s no shortage of things that you and I want to talk and chat about. And we’re going to get plenty of opportunities to do that when you’re hosting us for our two Dinosaur Trips experiences in Utah & Colorado and California & Arizona in May. And as you alluded to in this conversation, more future trips to come as well. We’re working on a whole bunch of stuff together in order to explore the world with Dinosaur tTips and give people this incredible access. We got digs coming up. We got a whole bunch. Obviously stay tuned to everything Dinosaur Trips is doing.
But at this point we really want to extend the invitation to join us in the spring of 2024 for those two first trips. I think they’re gonna be really unforgettable. Thanks again for your time, Dr. BC. We will be seeing you in the southwest this spring.
Thank you kindly Adios. Take care.