John Hankla, Jake Percival, and Megan Sims
When dinosaurs roamed the earth, Southeast Utah was a coastal paradise. Dinosaurs flourished in this utopia in numbers and variety of species unlike any other place. This coupled with the effective preservation of the bones in the rock, make Southeast Utah mecca for paleontologists young and old. Science Moab speaks with John Hankla from the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and a few of his recent students, Jake Percival and Megan Sims. We talk about life in the field and the work they are doing in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.
Meet the Scientist: John Hankla
John Hankla is a research associate with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and has spent 30 consecutive field seasons collecting fossils for museums and academic institutions in the American West. He served as the paleontology exhibit consultant for the most recent of the Jurassic franchise movies, Jurassic World: fallen kingdom.
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Interview Transcript - Dinosaur Utopia
While the blockbuster Jurassic Park feature dinosaurs in alternate universes and exotic offshore locales, the American West — and, more specifically, the Colorado Plateau — feature some of the richest fossil deposits found anywhere in the world. This week, we learn from three scientists who spend their time uncovering and preserving these fossils: John Hankla, Research Associate with the Denver Museum of Nature and Science; Megan Sims, Collection Manager for Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Kansas; and Jake Percival, a high-school sophomore who’s spent five years working on John’s research team.
Science Moab: What is it like to work in southeastern Utah and Grand Staircase-Escalante?
Hankla: It’s one of my favorite places to do field paleontology, and the most remote. You really do feel like ants doing busy work in the middle of nowhere. Getting into these sites can be complicated. You might say, Well, why do you bother? The answer is because the fossils are incredible. It was one of those experiences where everything we found was new and exciting and totally amazing. It’s the most “fossiliferous” region I’ve ever worked in.
Science Moab: What did southeastern Utah look like when these incredible dinosaurs were around?
Hankla: At the time of the dinosaurs, this was a coastal paradise. The Gulf of Mexico had flooded almost into Alaska, up through the center of this continent, creating two continents split by a shallow inland sea. Southeastern Utah was covered in a lush tropical floodplain between the ancient mountains, which were more or less where they are today, and a coastal environment along the beach.
And in that margin between the high country and the beach was this perfectly lush, green, fertile place for dinosaurs to evolve. We think because of encroachments of the sea, and some mountain-building events, there was a whole lot of speciation, or the creation of new species. If you could snap your fingers, this is the time you would want to go back in time to see.
Science Moab: What do you find most challenging about paleontology?
Hankla: Paleontology is the study of ancient life. If you really break that down, we’re less interested in skeletons and more interested in the living animals. Some of the questions we have about living animals are quite complicated, and really tough to deduce just from the leftover hard parts.
For example, take your favorite animal and remove all the muscles and tendons and skin and behavior, and most of its ecology. Put just the skeleton in a paper sack, and beat it up with a hammer. Then take about 30% of that and spread it over an acre of land. That’s the evidence we’re using to deduce the life of that animal.
In this country, fossils belong to the owner of the land where they’re found. For that reason, most paleontologists that I know are diehard public land supporters. In these rocks are the fossil data that basically hold up our understanding of how the world was made, how life on Earth evolved and became the world we know. This is our collective natural history belonging to the collective human race. One of the keys to making sure we have enough data to understand the world is ensuring the sources of that data are protected.
Science Moab: Once you find a fossil, how stable are they? How quickly do they break down?
Sims: With a lot of the dinosaur bones, they’re pretty safe. They’re big and chunky, and basically rocks themselves at this point.
Hankla: However, it’s a small miracle of field work and glue and tedious amounts of time to get that fossil put back into a condition that you can actually recognize. When you walk through a museum and see a dinosaur skeleton, consider how mind-blowingly unprofitable that is.
It’s not as simple as dinosaurs lived, dinosaurs died, people found them. There’s so much work that goes into every single skeleton you see on display somewhere.
Science Moab: What about dinosaurs has maintained your interest in such a challenging field?
Percival: There’s always something new to discover, something new to learn. And there are always big questions to be asked. Every single era before us is almost like an alien world.
Photo by Mike Remke
