So You Want To Be A Dinosaur Hunter trades the Hollywood version of discovery for something far more powerful: the quiet thrill of earning knowledge. Do you remember the moment when dinosaurs shifted from fascination to science for you?

I think it happened gradually rather than in a single moment. Like a lot of kids, I grew up with dinosaurs as the magnificent monsters of imagination — the T. rex with the world’s loudest roar, the brontosaurus with its ridiculous neck, the velociraptor as a movie villain. The shift from fascination to science came when I started paying attention to the work that produced what we know. The realization that someone, somewhere, had spent years on their knees in the heat with a brush finer than a paintbrush, just to free a bone that had been buried for sixty-five million years — that landed differently than the dinosaurs themselves. The dinosaurs are the headline. The work is the actual story. Once I started seeing it that way, the science became just as compelling as the creatures. Maybe even more so.

Many kids imagine fossil hunting as fast-paced and exciting. What’s the biggest misconception about paleontology you hope this book corrects?

The misconception I most wanted to correct is the one I think Hollywood reinforces: that paleontology is fast. It is not. A bone that takes thirty seconds to find on screen takes weeks to actually free from the rock, months more to clean and analyze in the lab, and sometimes years before the scientific interpretation is settled. The work is patient in a way that few professions are. And that patience is the science. The slowness is what makes the knowledge reliable. I wanted kids who are drawn to dinosaurs to see that the patience is not the boring part of the work. It is what makes the discoveries real.

Was there a particular step—fieldwork, excavation, or lab analysis—you found most fascinating to explain?

Definitely the lab analysis. Fieldwork has the romance, and excavation has the visible drama, but the lab is where the work actually becomes science. That is where a fossil stops being a thing you found and becomes evidence that something existed. The CT scanning of fossil interiors, the comparative anatomy across species, the chemical analysis of preserved tissue — these are the moments when the bone in front of you starts telling you a story that no one has ever heard before. I find that genuinely thrilling, and I wanted kids to see it. Many books focus on the dig site because that is what is photogenic. The lab is less photogenic, but arguably more astonishing.

How did you balance detailed scientific information with accessibility for younger readers?

The honest answer is that I trust kids more than the publishing industry sometimes does. Kids in the 10-14 age range can handle real content if the writing respects them. They do not need me to dilute the science; they need me to explain it well. So my approach is to use real terminology — sedimentary layers, stratigraphy, bone density analysis — and then make sure the surrounding context lets the reader understand what the term actually means in practice. I write the book imagining that the reader is curious, capable, and possibly already knows more than I do about specific dinosaurs. The book meets them where they are rather than where I assume they might be. In my experience, kids rise to that level of trust every time.

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