Dinosaurs and Your Career.

When I was a little girl I used to imagine all the things I was going to do when I was grown up. Interestingly, life as a biochemist did not feature on my list. Even more interesting neither did ballerina or fireman. What I really wanted to be was a palaeontologist. This is a slightly weird obsession for a 7 year old, but let’s face it, dinosaurs are cool and if you could dedicate your life to digging up their HUGE horrific bones then why wouldn’t you? Sadly, this passion faded by 10 or 11 and I started to aim for what I imagine is a slightly better paid and potentially long-lived field, medicine.

I say long-lived because as long as there are people and the world as we know it doesn’t end, we will always require medical professionals. This means as a Doctor or nurse you will always fill a required and important niche. In contrast there don’t seem to be too many dinosaurs around these days. This seems to suggest a problem of epic proportions. I don’t want to alarm anybody but there is a definite possibility that one day, hopefully not in our lifetimes, we may actually run out of dinosaur bones to unearth! This would be catastrophic and I want to emphasise that this is purely speculation and the likelihood of such an event happening is highly dependent on a range of complex factors. For example we would need to know how many dinosaur bones are actually out there and then determine how quickly they get dug up. In the long run, this may not even be a problem as we could always rebury a few skeletons and not tell the palaeontologists. Then they can have all the fun of digging them up again and again in new and interesting locations. 

On another note, lots of scientists in many fields dedicate their whole lives to researching a hypothesis which is never proven. This means that even if all the bones were safely out of the ground there is sure to be room and funding for those who still believe (and more importantly who have the publication record to beef up their claims) that there is something out there.

Another and more sinister possibility for the demise of palaeontology is that we may, in future, successfully clone multiple dinosaur species from a single amber preserved mosquito like on Jurassic Park! If this happens we will probably be too busy running from the snapping-jaws of these new aged reptiles to dig up the remains of their ancient ancestors.

But for those of you whose dream of digging up dinosaur bones is not to be thwarted by the possible difficulties and slim pickings of the field I include the following useful link:

Helpful Tips for the Future Palaeontologist. 

These scientists, judging from their outfits, glasses and facial hair, are clearly serious and passionate about what they do. If only I had seen this video before my dream was replaced by other childhood fancies how different things may have been! One, I could have had my own collection of tiny dinosaur skeletons and two, I could have been staring into the lifeless jaws of a tyrannosaurus rex instead of planning out my next set of experiments incorporating dangerous microbes. Sigh. Better luck next time.