Working With Dinosaurs - A Q&A With Author Kelly Milner Halls
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 Kelly Milner Halls, author of a number of books about dinosaurs, including the recently published ‘A Dinosaur for Washington.’
Zach Vanasse: Let me just start by saying congratulations on the brand new book!
Kelly Milner Halls: Well, thank you. And I’m really excited because I really wanted to write this book.
I always like to start these interviews by asking: how did you first get into dinosaurs?
I started loving dinosaurs when I was little because the New York World’s Fair dinosaurs went on tour. Remember those life size dinosaurs that looked so real back then and look so silly now?
Ha, yeah, I know exactly the ones you mean.
And as a little kid, I used to catch lizards all the time. And snakes and frogs And my mother said, we got a surprise for you. Come on, we’re going to go see something. And when I got out of the car and saw these big dinosaurs, to me, they were big lizards.
And I know the physiology is not the same, but it’s close enough when you’re a kid.
Absolutely.
I fell in love. And the strange thing is, I never fell out of love with dinosaurs, because it was just so neat. And I still love lizards and I still love dinosaurs. And then fast forward, I studied journalism in college, I thought I was going to be an investigative reporter.
Hey, me too!
Really? How interesting. We’ll see. We’re both using both your skill sets here. So. I realized I didn’t have the kill instinct [to be an investigative reporter]. Because if you’re Woodward and Bernstein, you have to make Nixon’s children feel very bad.
Ha, yeah, exactly.
I knew I couldn’t do that, so I thought, what am I going to do? I’m a writer. This is what I know. This is what I like. And then I realized somebody writes stuff for kids. And if you write for kids, you never have to be mean-spirited.
But you can write about the weirdest, strangest, most amazing things and get paid to do it. Now, we don’t get paid a lot, being a children’s writer. Don’t misunderstand me. I certainly am not. It’s a little like being a paleontologist. You don’t do it for the money. You do it ’cause you love it.
How did you land on dinosaurs as one of the topics you wanted to write about for children?
Because I had written for magazines and newspapers for kids all over the country, and I was a single mom, so I brought my kids with me on most of those assignments, and they got sick of truck stops all the time.
I said to my kids, well, what if we find you a fossil place? Somewhere to stop and stretch your legs where we can look for fossils. Will that be okay? And they said yes to that idea. So I started collecting all these places and I thought someone should put this in a book.
My first book – ‘Dino-Trekking: The Ultimate Dinosaur Lover’s Travel Guide’ – came out a long time ago in 1996. And inside it has every state and place you can go to look at dinosaurs in every state. It also has the Curator’s Corner because I wanted to interview an expert about each state’s geology.
I’m travelling my way around and I get to Georgia and I call up this guy and he says, “Well, I could help you with that, but really I’m not the best person to do it. You need to call a guy named Rick Spears because everything dinosaurs is his thing.”
I called up Rick Spears and I made him my Curator Corner expert for the state of Georgia. And then he said, “Who’s illustrating the book?” And I said, “Well, I don’t have budget for illustrations, And he said, okay, I’ll do it for free.”
He did these remarkable little line drawings of dinosaurs for my first book. And there’s a lot of them in there. So Rick and I made very fast, great friends because we had dinosaurs in common.
This launched my writing about dinosaurs and my partnership with Rick. And I thought, hey maybe I can write only about dinosaurs. Wouldn’t that be great?
Nope. Not possible. Wish it was. Not possible. So now I write about dinosaurs whenever I can.
Rick and I have now written four dinosaur books together. Part of the reason I like Rick Spears to illustrate is that Rick works at the Fernbank Science Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He’s a science guy. And he knows scale and relativity and size. If he’s going to put dinosaurs side by side, they’re going to be right.
Whereas some other illustrators are lovely artists. But they put a tyrannosaur in a round egg. Right. Which is not right. So, anyway, that’s how I started writing about dinosaurs. That was the first one, Dino-Trekking.
Then the second one, we had a different dinosaur artist hired to help us with dinosaur mummies. It’s all about soft tissue. And this guy’s not turning in his sketches, not turning in his sketches, turning in rough sketches, not finishing them. And boom, he’s gone. So I have no illustrator. So, what I do? I call up Rick Spears. And I say, get me a sample cover design now, it has to be done tomorrow.
He does it; it becomes Dinosaur Mummies.
So at this point you and Rick have now done two dinosaur books together.
Yup! And they both look so nice. So then a librarian at an elementary school said to me; “I need a dinosaur book for my little guys because they don’t understand how big they are.”
Because, you know, you say to a kid, that dinosaur is as big as a bus. Well which bus? The daycare bus? The school bus, the city bus? As big as a house? Well, not all houses are the same. One story, two story, apartment building. So we decided to have a make believe dinosaur parade to help them better visualize these dinosaurs.
And so we wrote, Dinosaur Parade. Where the people in the pictures are three and a half feet tall. So for every spread, they know how big the dinosaur is now compared to them. And one of the things I love about that one is the color schemes, the bright colors.
Rick is just exceptional and he gets it. He gets that kids like color.
What is it that keeps you coming back to the topic of dinosaurs for your books whenever you can?
You know, for one thing, I grew up in Texas where they had lots of dinosaur fossils. Then I moved to Utah for college, which was a story all of its own, but they had lots of dinosaurs.
Then I was a young mother in Colorado; once again, lots of dinosaurs.
So they were always around me. And when I had kids, I wanted them to get excited about dinosaurs as well. I got permission to start buying toys and books and things again. And fortunately, my kids love dinosaurs.
That’s great to hear that the gene was passed down.
Yes, they still love them. Yeah. So the love just never went away. And neither has my curiosity to have all these questions about these animals answered. What did it eat? How did it die? All those things.
When I was little, they didn’t really have any books for kids about dinosaurs. I read books on Abraham Lincoln. They were my favorite. But my parents gave me a guide to reptiles and amphibians.
Because when we moved to a little town called Friendswood, Texas, I was almost five and every kind of snake in North America is in that region. So they got me the little guide to reptiles and amphibians, put me in steel-toed boots and said, “Don’t touch these!” I couldn’t read yet. They just circled the ones I wasn’t supposed to touch.
And I fell in love with these creatures. So when my mom made that connection between lizards and dinosaurs, that was it. And it just never went away. And I’m really glad it didn’t because it’s so magical knowing that these – some enormous, but some small – completely foreign creatures to us once thrived here for millions and millions of years. It’s really magical. So if I could, I would write about dinosaurs all the time. But it is not practical.
Right. So tell me about how this newest book – A Dinosaur for Washington – came about.
When I moved to Washington State 25 years ago, I said, well, what fossils do you have here?
I hadn’t done the research because I just didn’t think about it. And they said; “Well, we don’t really have dinosaur fossils in Washington state.”
As you probably know, there was that prehistoric ocean that covered most of Washington state at that time. And then I thought, “Well, so what, you know? We find fossils in watery Kansas. We get plesiosaurs and things.”
And they said, “Well, after the ocean receded, we had a huge number of volcanoes in Washington, Oregon, and Northern Canada, and those went crazy. In places in Washington State, the basalt is three miles deep.
I did not know, realize that. That’s crazy.
Isn’t that astonishing? If we happen to have any great prehistoric dinosaur era Mesozoic fossils, we can’t get to them.
However, there’s this one island called Sucia Island. It’s in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Seattle, Washington.
And there is Cretaceous rock there that didn’t get covered up by volcanic rock. So people that have permits can go and collect ammonites and all the little sea creatures you can find. You’re not supposed to collect them if you’re just a citizen, obviously, because important fossils have to go to the repository to keep them safe and steady.
And so these two guys, retired gentlemen, flew their seaplane to Sucia Island looking for ammonites, as well as prehistoric crabs and whale fossils, which came after the dinosaurs.
These two guys had a permit through the Burke Museum and went out looking for stuff for their collections. One of them liked to prospect on the cliff sides, the other liked to rake through the gravel on the beach.
The guy that was going to prospect on the cliffs came back with this softball sized fossil and he said; “Look at this, look at this, this is amazing!”
And they looked at it and said; “Gosh, I wonder what it is? Because it wasn’t what they were used to finding. It wasn’t a whale. It wasn’t a crab. It wasn’t a sea creature. The one guy said; “I think there’s more to this. I’m going to go look for more.”
He looked, and he looked, and he looked, and their day ended, and they flew home. A year later, they went back again, because he’s still looking for the other half. Doesn’t find anything. Third year, he goes back. Bingo. This time they find it. The other half of this fossil.
Wow, that’s commitment!
It’s amazing. The idea that he found it was even more amazing. But at this point they realized these fossils fit together hand in glove and that this was an important find. This is not an ammonite. Right. And for those of you who don’t know, ammonites are sea creatures, a little like nautilus. They’re little creatures that live in the shells. So they take the GPS coordinates. They take pictures. They can’t get the other half out of the ground because it’s still just solidified in the matrix, in the stone that’s kept it safe all this time.
And it’s right on the shore, so when the tides come in, it washes away. So they need someone to come and collect this stuff right away.. And the Burke Museum is excited, but they just can’t go to get it right then.
So this graduate student, who is now Dr. Brendan Peacock, says; “I want to go get it. I want to go get it. I want to go get it. So he gathers a group of guys. They don’t have a seaplane – they have to take the boats from San Juan over to Sucia Island. And they bring a diamond blade saw so that they can literally cut this chunk of matrix out of the beach as the tide’s coming in.
They were able to get it and they brought it back. It took a year to prep it. And when they finished it, they still didn’t know what it was. I mean, they knew it wasn’t a whale because it was Cretaceous rock. Couldn’t be a whale.Obviously it wasn’t a crab or anything like that. And it was big. So at first I thought maybe Plesiosaur and Mosasaur.
There were plesiosaurs and mosasaurs eating those ammonites and other things. So they said, maybe it’s a plesiosaur. Nope, it’s too big. It’s not a mosasaur. It’s not the right shape.
And they start thinking that they’re going to have to solve this mystery. So they take it to other paleontologists all across the country. Finally, they get to Dr. Philip Currie.
We did a trip with him last year!
Isn’t he amazing? He’s such a nice man.
He’s so great. He has the enthusiasm and the excitement, and the want to share and talk about dinosaurs.
I know, I love that so much! Well, Dr. Currie said, “I think it’s a Tyrannosaur.” And the reason he thought that was tyrannosaur, was because it was hollow. And I know some sauropods have hollow bones too, but it had also had little clams from the Cretaceous period inside the bone. So they said, yeah, that probably is what it is. It’s probably a Tyrannosaur.
Dr. Currie wasn’t sure which kind of tyrannosaur it could be. And so then they went to Jack Horner when used to be at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. And he thought it was a tyrannosaur too.
They think its closest match is Daspletosaurus, which is dangerously close to the same size as a Tyrannosaurus rex. Which I am sort of tickled by because if your state is only going to have one dinosaur, it might as well be a tyrannosaur!
So how did the process of putting the book together come about?
I read about it in the newspaper, but it had very little details about who made the find, that knd of thing. So I just reached out to everyone. Because I studied journalism in college, sourcing is important to me. And telling the true story, the whole story. So all the newspaper article said was that two volunteers found this fossil and then the Burke Museum collected it.
Who are these two volunteers? That’s what I want to know. I’m reading and I’m reading and I’m reading and there’s never any names. Finally I went to the library to get this paper by Dr. Sidor and Dr. Peecook, they did a paper [on the fossil find].
I print it out and I read it, and at the very end of the article, there’s a little teeny box that says; “Much thanks to this volunteer and this volunteer for letting us know that this fossil was there.”
That’s how I got Jim Goedert and David Starr’s names. Now I have to find them. I start searching them in Google, and I find one of their names. He volunteers at a fossil club.
Ha, sounds like the right guy for sure!
Yeah, absolutely. I emailed the treasurer of the Fossil Club, because that’s the only email that was on the website, and I said, “I’m wanting to write this book about the only dinosaur fossil found in Washington State. Can you pass my name and email address along to this man? Because I’d love to talk to him.”
He emailed me back and we talked. I got to find out who his partner in all this was, and I got the true origin story and I knew we could tell the whole story because these guys had a permit.
They weren’t out there stealing fossils. They were doing it the right way. And the fact that they reported it to the Burke Musuem was important. These were all things I wanted to have in the book, because I want kids to understand that we need to be careful with important fossils.
Then I interviewed Dr. Christian Sidor and Dr. Peecook. I interviewed a prep guy, and I interviewed Jack Horner – who I’ve known forever – and I interviewed Philip Currie. It was a joy and it was so much fun.
And I like that it proves to kids that this kind of thing could happen anywhere. Even if a dinosaur has never been found where they live, there’s still hope they might find something someday.
And that’s the “magic” of science, right? We’re always discovering new things, learning about new possibilities.
Exactly!
Well, again congratulations on the book. I really enjoyed it and I’m looking forward to sharing it with the kids in my life.
Is there another dinosaur book in the future for you?
You know, Rick and I want to do a sequel to the Dinosaur Mummies book because there’s a lot more soft tissue samples that have been discovered since that came out. And we’re also doing another cryptozoology book called Sea Monsters: A Field Guide.
Sounds like fun. I’ll look forward to reading that then!