Gregory Erickson was a construction worker at the University of Washington football stadium when he decided his true passion was dinosaurs. Now at Florida State University, he is, among other things, developing novel ways to tease out the life cycle of T. rex and Apatosaurus from long-dead bones.
What drew you to dinosaurs? As a kid I loved dinosaurs, but in college I wanted to be an engineer. Then I took a dinosaur class in my junior year and found a triceratops skull. When I graduated I was a construction worker for about a year before deciding to go back to grad school. Jack Horner [the renowned paleontologist] took me in—I think he liked that I knew how to use a shovel.
How did you set about measuring the age of an animal that lived 70 million years ago? I was at the Field Museum in Chicago and noticed these ...
