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Q: Did you pursue art in college formally?
A: No, my focus then was biology. In addition to which, I was very interested in the Creation/Evolution debate. My university years were right about the time when Creationists began demanding equal time alongside evolution in classrooms.

Q: Was that important for you?
A: My family was devoutly Christian. I was brought up believing in a "young earth" - that the earth was only 6,000-10,000 years old. I had certain beliefs about life's origins and I wanted to substantiate/confirm those beliefs with empirical data. During my undergraduate years I was a zealous "young earth creationist."

Q: How did your ideas about the Earth and evolution come to change?
A: My pilgrimage to an old-earth evolutionary understanding of how the world works, began as a result of fieldwork in geology and paleontology. In the summer of 1982, I was a member of a crew excavating mammal-like reptiles in a quarry in Kansas. As we dug down through the layers, many of them preserved the fossilized footprints of terrestrial animals.

Q: Why were footprints especially significant?
A: One of the principal tenets of creationism is that Noah's flood killed all the animals that weren't on the Ark. When I saw these footprints I realized they had to have been made by living animals walking the surface of the earth - but the animals were supposed to have been killed by the Flood. How did the footprints get into multiple layers, the very layers that were supposed to have been deposited as a result of this global flood? That really got me thinking…

Fossil footprints were very important because of the power they held in forcing me to admit that the earth was not only 6000 years old!

Deltadromeus
Photo © Paul C. Sereno

Q: What did you do when you finished graduate school?
A: Following a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto, I was hired by Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada to act as an advisor/consultant for a big dinosaur reconstruction project. I was supposed to make sure that as the skeletons were assembled, the right bone was placed in the correct position.

Unfortunately, I had no prior experience with dinosaurs and I had never done any practical or commercial paleo. I had only done research. Fortunately, dinosaur paleontologist Dr. Philip Currie was at the museum. He had the knowledge and field experience, so I pestered him constantly. It was like one long tutorial.

At the Tyrrell I also learned a variety of molding and casting techniques in addition to how to assemble a real dinosaur skeleton.

Q: How did you learn how to sculpt foam? A: One of the guys who I worked with at the Tyrrell Museum is a really gifted sculptor. He (Wayne Marshall) carved missing bones and I watched him work the foam. I sort of just had this feeling that I could sculpt also. A Brachiosaurus [long-necked plant-eating dinosaur] was the first large-scale thing I ever did. PAST was contacted by the Field Museum in Chicago to assemble a Brachiosaur and they asked me if I could fill in the missing pieces. It was all very exciting, but it never crossed my mind that we couldn't do this project. I looked at what real bones they had and I knew what bones I had to carve. Q: Could you describe the process of what you do, step by step? A: Paul will usually send a list of what he wants me to carve. Sometimes the list is very specific from the beginning - other times it's vague because the preparation of the fossil is still in progress. Paul likes to use as much original material as possible, so he might tell me, "We might be able to incorporate the front half," or "you might only have to carve part of this or that bone."

Photo © Stephen Godfrey

Paul will then have his lab send me cast replicas of the existing bones. I work from these to sculpt the missing ones. Having accurate replicas allows me to sort of duplicate in the foam the "look" of the fossil bones.