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Dr. Lowell Dingus
© AMNH Photo Studio |
Why do so many kids get hooked on fossils? "They seem straight out of science fiction except that they're real," says Dr. Lowell Dingus. "When people go to a museum
like the American Museum of Natural History, we put fossils out and people can actually touch something that lived millions and millions of years ago. The fact that
we don't see these species around us today is just intriguing to a lot of kids." Trained as a geologist, Lowell describes himself as a hybrid between a research
paleontologist and science writer, but the writing part snuck up on him a little later in his career. "I always wanted to be in paleontology," he explains, "and the
subject can be approached from either a biological perspective or a geological one. I picked the geological approach because I like rocks." He was also more interested
in the kinds of questions that geological paleontologists could answer, such as what kinds of environments the animals lived in, and how long ago.
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| After getting his Ph.D. in paleontology from the University of California in 1984, Lowell took a job at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences working on an
exhibit about evolution. Three years later, when the American Museum of Natural History advertised for someone to come work with the Department of Vertebrate
Paleontology to develop a new exhibition for the fossil halls, Lowell moved to New York to direct
what turned out to be a ten-year project. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to engage visitors who range from children in strollers to college professors.
Lowell's exhibit work led to a growing appreciation of the need for the scientific community to communicate effectively with the general public. "If we don't make
our research understandable and intriguing to the general public, they'll begin to wonder what we're [scientists] doing and why it's important to them," he
points out. So the scientist became a writer as well, "to try to bring both kids and interested adults into the world of paleontology. I thought I could help
the general public understand that paleontology isn't just going out somewhere remote and beginning to dig in the ground for fossils. There's lots of homework
in planning expeditions, a lot of interesting, but sometimes tedious, work involved in data collecting, and I wanted to give people a better sense of all the
steps a paleontologist goes through to do his or her work." Just as teachers begin planning a field trip well before the class gets on the bus, scientists must
lay the groundwork for an expedition months, sometimes years, ahead of time.
Lowell directed the renovations of the AMNH Fossil Halls (shown here as it is today). This photograph shows the 3-toed
hind foot "node" information stand, which outlines how birds are united with other dinosaurs in the group called theropods. The famous skeleton of the
Tyrannosaurus rex can be seen in the background.
© AMNH Library, Special Collections |
Lowell describes his first writing project, a children's book called What Color Is That Dinosaur? as
"an exercise in trying to lay out what we don't know as opposed to what we do know. Dinosaurs went extinct more than 65 million years ago, so we can't go and
observe them to see what color skin they had," the paleontologist
points out. Sometimes people tend to think that scientists know all the answers, "but if we did, we wouldn't be scientists and there would be nothing left to learn.
It's only those things we don't know that we can ask questions about, and collect evidence about to test hypotheses. That's the guts of scientific research." Lowell
has gone on to write nine more books for both children and adults, and has written or co-authored more than 25 scientific articles.
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Now a Research Associate in Paleontology at the Museum, he also works for the InfoQuest Foundation. The InfoQuest
Foundation is "committed to communicating results of current research in paleontology, geology, evolutionary studies and other natural sciences. A major goal of InfoQuest's
program is the Foundation's effort to improve access to scientists and scientific information." ( :1).
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Out in the field,
Lowell gets his exercise collecting geologic samples. Here he is exposing fresh sediment during a 1996 expedition to Mongolia.
© Lowell Dingus
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Reflecting on his writing for non-specialists, Lowell finds it much harder and more challenging than writing for his colleagues, and wishes more scientists rose to the
challenge of writing in a way that lay people can understand. He declares such writing to be, "a very important exercise. That's when you start to understand the basic
foundations of the questions you're answering, and the answers you're getting." Kids, he notes, can actually be easier to write for than adults, "because most educated
adults come with preconceptions. Even people who accept evolution have a very difficult time understanding why birds are dinosaurs, because they were taught in a way
that made birds very different from reptiles. Whereas if you can point out the similarities between the structure of the foot and arm bones to children, they'll go right
along and understand the evidence you're using to make that connection between birds and dinosaurs."
When he presents paleontological information, Lowell tries to blend the accessible elements of the process with the more rigorous and didactic ones. One useful device
is to do so within the context of an expedition, which he describes as "kind of a romantic endeavor to the public — at least until you get out there in the rough conditions
— so it has a human interest aspect as well as a scientific one." The other way in which Lowell often approaches scientific questions is as if the reader was a detective on
the trail of a scientific mystery. "The more research I do, the more I consider myself a kind of forensic investigator. You've got to use the clues in the rocks and the
fossils in order to answer the question."
He also finds it helpful to write as though he were having a conversation with the reader. "Then it's easier for people to follow, as if it were a story, which it usually
is. It's also easier to digress into various kinds of adventures and weave your way back to a scientific point, to intersperse the science with the romance of what we do."
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Recently, a vast dinosaur nesting ground was discovered in the Cretaceous sediments of Patagonia. Here Lowell takes a sample that will help zero in on a date for the rocks at the site.
© Lowell Dingus
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His advice to aspiring science writers? "Information needs to be presented clearly, but it can be made progressively more complex as your audience becomes more
knowledgeable. One other thing," he suggests. "Make it real." Lowell isn't averse to science fiction, or cartoon-style presentations, but he emphasizes that it's essential
to convey the foundation of science as an ongoing process of inquiry. "It's very important not just to teach kids that dinosaurs are reptiles and vertebrates, but rather
to engage them in asking why we think they're reptiles and vertebrates. To me a good question is worth twice as much as a right answer, because it can lead to a better
answer down the line. And they're learning to think." |
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Most of Lowell's current writing is about the expeditions he undertakes as a research paleontologist for the AMNH. During the trips, he takes exhaustive scientific notes,
and also records "all of the crazy events that occur as part of an expedition." His first trips, between 1991 and 1998, were to Mongolia's Gobi Desert in the footsteps of
legendary dinosaur hunter, Roy Chapman Andrews. A second project took him south to Patagonia, in Argentina, where in 1997 he, with colleague Luis Chiappe of the Natural
History Museum of Los Angeles County, co-lead the team which discovered the first embryos of sauropod dinosaurs, and the first fossils of embryonic dinosaur skin.
The latest expedition is another collaboration with Chiappe, to Xinjiang Province in northwest China. "We're just getting started, but we've found fossils of dinosaurs,
turtles, crocodiles, and some stuff we haven't identified yet," Lowell reports happily. In a couple of weeks he'll be back in Patagonia, mapping the dinosaur nesting
site, and writing down everything that happens in his little orange field notebook. Wherever those notes end up — whether in an exhibition label, a book, an article, or a
museum guide — they'll play a part in explaining to the public how science really works.
Some books by Lowell Dingus:
(sorted in reverse chronological order)
Chiappe, L. M. and L. Dingus. Walking on Eggs: The Discovery of Dinosaur Eggs in Patagonia, New York: Scribner, June 2001. 200 pp. (for adults and young adults)
Norell, M. A. and L. Dingus. A Nest of Dinosaurs: The Story of Oviraptor, New York: Doubleday/Random House, 1999. 42 pp. (for children)
Dingus, L. and L. Chiappe. The Tiniest Giants, New York: Doubleday/Random House, 1999. 42 pp. (for children)
Dingus, L. and T. Rowe. The Mistaken Extinction: Dinosaur Extinction and the Origin of Birds, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997. 362 pp. (for adults)
Dingus, L. and M. Norell. Searching for Velociraptor, New York: Harper Collins, 1996. 32 pp. (for children)
Dingus, L. Next of Kin. New York: Rizzoli, 1996. 160 pp. (for adults and young adults)
Norell, M. A., E. S. Gaffney, and L. Dingus. Discovering Dinosaurs. New York: Knopf, 1995. 204 pp. (for adults and young adults)
Dingus, L. What Color Is That Dinosaur? Brookfield: Millbrook Press, 1994. 79 pp. (for children)
Footnote:
1: http://www.infoq.org
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