While most of us were receiving our first pet dog, Mathew Wedel was reading National Geographic stories and flipping through picture books on dinosaurs.  While most of us thought about when to feed our pet cat or bird, Mathew had visions of enourmous reptiles in his mind. 

He may never be able to say, "I own a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex," but Mathew is still fascinated by these larger-than-life creatures from the world's past.  He is so much so, that he can say 31 years later he is still dreaming of dinosaurs, finding fossils, and making connections between the birds of today and those terrifying birds of the past.  

Mathew Wedel is a professional paleontologist who studies bones in dinosaurs and bones to learn about the sauropods and theropods of the past.  He's doing a lot of important in the name of our extinct friends, but more importantly, he loves his job.

Besides visiting museums, collecting fossils, going on road trips, and publishing acclaimed papers, Mathew also contributes to the witty, but informative Saurpod Vertebra Picture of the Week (SV-POW) with fellow SV-POWskteers Darren Naish and Mike Taylor (also paleontologists.)

We had the chance to pick apart Mathew Weidel's thoughts just like he picks apart those bones.  

Why  focus on paleontology, dinosaurs, sauropods? What about these creatures appeals to you?

Is it something that stemmed from childhood?

I have to answer these together, because they are deeply intertwingled. When I was three years old, National Geographic had a cover story on dinosaurs. I was instantly hooked. Most kids go through a dinosaur phase...mine is in its 31st year and shows no signs of letting up. So the whole time I was growing up I was reading dinosaur books and dreaming about being a paleontologist.

Here's the thing, though: the actual work is very, very different from how I imagined it when I was a kid. I figured that you go out, dig up dinosaurs, clean up the bones, and put them in museums. By and large, that's the story that gets presented to the public, and we do, in fact, do those things, but there's a lot more. A huge part of paleontology is comparing fossils to one another and to the remains of living animals to figure out how extinct animals were related, how they functioned when they were alive, how they moved, how they breathed, and so on. And I think it's inevitable that as you make those comparisons, your interests broaden. 

Here is an example: right now as I am typing, the bones from my Thanksgiving turkey are sitting in a tub of hydrogen peroxide in the kitchen. When they're all clean and shiny white, I'll keep some of them to measure and study, and send some off to be imaged with an electron microscope. I'm interested to see how the surface texture of bone differs between areas where muscles attached, and areas where air sacs entered the bone. If there is a consistent difference, we might be able to look at the fine texture of dinosaur bones and refine our inferences about their muscles and air sacs. 

So my professional life turns out to be even more interesting than I anticipated as a kid. Everywhere I look there are connections to be drawn and work to be done. Also, it is just fantastically rewarding to be curious about something and then to go out and do the work, conduct the tests or experiments, and try to get some answers. Being able to satisfy my personal curiosity and move science forward at the same time is a big win-win situation.

What kind of research are you currently doing on sauropods? Theropods?

My main area of research is pneumatic (air-filled) bones in dinosaurs and birds. Everyone knows that birds have hollow bones, but not many people realize that sauropod and theropod dinosaurs—the extinct ancestors of birds—also had air-filled bones. So did pterosaurs. I'm interested in two big questions: first, did dinosaurs have efficient flow-through lungs like those of living birds, and second, did pneumatic bones help dinosaurs evolve such large body sizes? 

My work in sauropods offers other interesting opportunities as well. I'm working with collaborators to describe a couple of new sauropods. It's a lot of work and we want to be careful to get it right, so you may not hear about these for a few more years. Sometimes the pace of the work can be frustrating; I know these things right now, but no one else will know them until a paper goes through peer review and publication, which can take months to years. But it's more than worth it to have your work carefully vetted before its out there for everyone to see. I'd rather take the time and get it right, than rush things and make mistakes.

What can the “birds” of the past tell us about the birds of today?

Comparing living animals to their extinct relatives gives us reciprocal illumination. Looking and birds and crocs and other living animals tells us more about how dinosaurs were put together, and about how to interpret some of the weird structures we find in their skeletons. But at the same time, paleontology tells us where the animals that we know and love came from, and how they got to be the way that they are. Most people have seen quill knobs on the wing bones of birds, where the big flight feathers attach. Those quill knobs are also present in Velociraptor, which was too big to fly—but some of its smaller relatives, like Microraptor, might have flown. So we know that this body plan that is so successful today evolved a very long time ago, and under very different circumstances. 

Would you recommend animal lovers/enthusiasts to study paleontology? Why or why not?

Yes, absolutely. One of the best courses I took in college was stratigraphy, where we learned how sedimentary rocks are laid down, and what kinds of environments they formed in. I love taking long road trips, and after I had that stratigraphy course, I realized that a lot of the rocks I saw along the highway were things I could identify. I knew when I was driving through an ancient seabed in Missouri, or red cliffs formed from Jurassic sand dunes in the desert Southwest. I'd driven past those rocks before, but because I didn't know anything about them, they didn't register. Knowledge made them meaningful, and it enriched my experience when I traveled. Same thing with learning the constellations, which I'd always wanted to do but didn't get around to until a couple of years ago. Now it doesn't matter where I am or what season it is, I can go outside at night and find familiar stars and feel at home. 

I think the potential for enrichment is even greater when it comes to animals because we have such a strong emotional bond to them. There is something very strange and powerful about parting the feathers on a bird's wing and seeing a tiny claw on its thumb. It's a reminder of the grandeur and the interconnectedness of life.

Is it possible a mass extinction like what happened with the dinosaurs can happen again in our lifetime?

Yep! There are still plenty of rocks floating around out there in the solar system, as the impact on Jupiter earlier this fall demonstrated. But in the long history of complex life on Earth, there have only been five major mass extinctions (and a host of smaller ones). So the odds of one happening on any given day—or in any given million years—are pretty small. Like most biologists and paleontologists, I'm more worried about the changes we humans are making to the planet. I'm not talking about global warming—there is good evidence that it is real and that humans are driving it, but I think that living things will shift with the changing climates as they often have in the past. I'm more concerned with the possibility that they won't have any places to shift to. Our national parks and other wild areas are essentially islands in a sea of developed land. How long can our wild animals survive on these islands, and how will they jump from one island to the next when conditions on the Earth change—as they certainly will, in the short term and in the long term, from global warming and from the natural cycles of the planet?

What are your thoughts on animal conservation?

I'm all for it. But I think it's doomed in the long run unless it is tied to, or even focused on, preserving sufficient territory for the animals to exist in. We are in a weird situation right now, where we still have representatives of most of our wild animals, but those representatives aren't very numerous and don't have much room to roam. In the next century or two, the big challenge will be to keep those species alive and hopefully increase their space and their numbers before they go through a terrible loss of genetic diversity, which would be devastating to their long-term survival. These goals wouldn't be easy to accomplish if the human population stabilized today, and they'll be harder in the future when there are more of us around. We have some tough choices to make.

What is your favorite part about studying sauropods?

They're too big to ship to my lab (that's not my favorite part, just the lead-in to my favorite part). So I have to go to them, which means visiting museums. So I get to travel a lot, which is great, but also not my favorite part. When I'm on a museum visit, I spend most of my time down in the basement taking pictures and measuring bones. It's intense and a lot of fun. But I also try to take a few minutes to go upstairs to the public galleries, and deliberately switch off my analytical side, and just stand and stare in wonder at the big mounted skeletons, just like I did when I was a kid. It is nice to take a break from work and revel in the fact that I get to work on the coolest animals that ever lived! That's my favorite part.

Your blog SV-POW, with Darren and Mike, started as a joke, but then expanded to bigger and better things? Explain

Well, it literally was a joke, in an e-mail exchange. And then we all three sort of paused and thought, “Hey, why not?” I've read a lot of books which the authors claimed to have written because that's the book they always wanted to read. SV-POW! is the blog we always wanted to read, so we started writing it. And almost immediately it stopped being a joke or even the descendant of a joke. We realized that there were lots of interesting little morsels to explain, and that we could have a lot of fun doing so since we could write to whatever length we wanted and put in lots of pretty pictures and not worry about getting anyone else's approval ahead of time. Even more importantly, we realized that there are a lot of people who liked what we were doing. Without putting on airs, we think that this sort of thing—the ultra-niche blog done by the people doing the work—is going to be the wave of the future. Why settle for the dumbed-down sensationalized version of science (or automotive design, or cooking, or whatever you're into) when you can get it firsthand from the people who are actually engaged in it? 

What advice would you give to someone who wants to study paleontology, particularly related to animals of the past?

Start saving the bones from your dinner table! Seriously. Cook a whole chicken or turkey, save every bone you can, boil the bones for about an hour, scrub the gross bits off, and soak them overnight in ordinary drugstore hydrogen peroxide to degrease them and turn them white. Now start looking at how they fit together. Go online and find pictures of skeletons, and see how much of the animal you can put back together (white glue and jewelry wire are useful here). That's what we do. It's harder for the extinct things because the bones are bigger, more fragile, and we usually don't have nearly all of them, but that's the essence of paleontology. 

I'm not saying that reading books, finding journal articles, and so on isn't useful. It's crucial. But you'll learn more from putting a chicken skeleton back together, and the memory of doing it will stay with you, whether you ever build another skeleton or not. It's priceless experience, and you can get started in your kitchen, tonight, for about ten bucks.