Last year my mother sent me some photocopied archives about my grandma’s family history compiled by my late great aunt, who had an avid interest in genealogy. My grandma’s and great aunt’s grandfather, Adrian Van Santvoordt Saunders (A.V.S. as he was known in his writings) was an imposing judge who lived and worked in…

As a paleontologist, I am daily looking backward into the depth of deep time. Regularly pondering phenomena, which occur across millions or billions of years. The daily, yearly or even decadal cycles that occupy most people’s minds seem like an infantilism small flash of time to me. To me 10,000 years seems like a rather…

I remember it. Enthusiastically I enrolled in my first paleontology class in college, and I remember coming up to the professor after the first day of class all proud and excited. “I wanted to be a paleontologist. “ I remember his depressing reply. “Kid, don’t you know there are no jobs in paleontology?” I shrugged…

Wedged between the end of finals, Christmas, and New Years are the required government year-end reports that are submitted to the Bureau of Land Management detailing all the research I have done on public lands in the United States under research permits I applied to during the year. It is a time to gather up…