Re: Dinofest '98

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Date
Henry Gee wrote:
     
>     I find dinosaurs, although lots of fun, conceptually less interesting 
>     than some other extinct groups, but that's just a personal thing. As a 
>     kid I found fossil fish much more fun, and I can't explain why -- 
>     perhaps the displays at the Natural History Museum seemed nicer to a 
>     five-year-old. 


Hear hear. The popular perception seems to be that an interest in dinosaurs
is (could be) a pathway to a more general interest in paleontology. I wonder
how true that is in practice. My experience is that dinosaurs are more of an
infatuation with kids and not a symptom of an interest in paleontological
things per se. It would be interesting to know what led those people into
it, who actually made a career of paleontology. I, like Henry Gee, found
fish (and mammals) more interesting than dinosaurs as a child, possibly
because where I grew up there were fossil fish but no dinosaurs. I would
suspect that actual hands-on experience with fossils (any fossils) at a
young age will be more conducive to a life-long interest than reading any
number of books on the subject. (Although reading Bjorn Kurten is what got
me on to mammals in particular.)

Lars Werdelin (who has no children of his own to test this on)
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Lars Werdelin, Senior Curator
Paleozoology, Swedish Museum of Natural History
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