Its voting day! Make sure you get your say. That way you can have your say later. Also it will really make a difference. As it always does! Thank all the volunteers today! GO VOTE!

September 2012

Its September and the Museum is quieting down. It will be closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays until June now. The summer visitors are leaving and soon the sounds of school groups will echo in our halls. This fall will see a return to Dino fever. Some will rejoice, others will frown. [See below about our Fall exhibit.] I am also missing my summer intern, Becca Payne. She was to keep you posted about the happenings of the Prep Lab and Museum this summer in this blog. It was fun to watch her working in the lab and then telling you about her struggles. I think it helps in the learning process to restate and organize what you just learned, so I hope writing in the blog helped Becca. So I say good-bye to Becca, good luck at Brown, I will miss you, and come back soon! What is new for the Fall? Well, the Museum, moves closer to its 10th anniversary in 2013. Lots of fun things to look forward to with that approaching. In a few months, I will have, which you have endured, been here 1 year. Do I hear party coming up? The new exhibit is opening in a few weeks. "Did Dinosaurs Poop?"

We will be exploring Coprolites and Mesozoic eating habits. It will be a lot of fun for our visiting families AND we get to talk POOP for the next 4 months. WOW! Just think of all the great puns you have been saving up to say. Now is your chance. Also, usually Johanna, being the programs manager for the Museum, designs the activities for the opening Family Day Event. This year, with less Museum staff, it falls to me. I will be looking for a great support from you volunteers to help me on Saturday, September 15th. It will be a "load" of fun. Volunteers, Come to the Volunteer Meeting this Thursday @ 3:30 pm and celebrate my Bday a few days early.Hope to see you soon!

"Manual Labor"

Becca here again~!

So, my main project of the last few weeks has been starting work on a number of standard operating procedures for the Prep Lab-- I've been writing up short little manuals crammed with photos on how to do certain things in the lab, use certain pieces of equipment, and so on. 

So far, there is an SOP for making thin acryloid, turning the air pump in the Maintenance Room on and off, and turning on the camera attached to the stereo microscope. There will be at least a few more on the micro pick and other air scribes, as well as (fingers crossed!) the air abrasive, before the summer's out!

These have been a surprisingly fun project-- while writing up the guides themselves is not hugely dynamic, I'm really enjoying having the chance to learn about various pieces of equipment in the lab in such detail. I have to go through everything to photograph it, so I feel like I really know what I'm doing with some of these procedures now. Which, I suppose, is the point of making these! They can serve as a reference for present and future lab-goers. 

These will probably be printed out in the lab as well as posted on the server, but maybe (with luck) they can even be posted on the desktop computer in the lab for easy access. Who knows? The possibilities are sort of endless with this!

Agwē Update #3

Hi all! Becca again!

So it's been a while since I last updated you all on Agwē, my Green River fish.
I've had a ton of progress on the first three vertebrae, which I'm incredibly excited about. I can actually see them now!

I've been focusing on this area shown here for the last two weeks, once again using hand tools in the form of dental picks. I've also been doing a ton of gluing-- I recently made my own incredibly thin thing acryloid to use on my specimen, since I was discovering that Paleo Bond penetrant stabilizer, while brilliant, was actually losing some of the detail. Even that was still too thick, so I mixed an acryloid that's much more acetone than bead, and I've been impressed with the results so far. It's not as strong of a glue as I'd like, but that's the price I pay for keeping all the detail visible, I suppose!

Now to tackle the rest of the spine. Slowly but surely...

Working Conditions?

I've noticed I seem to have a lot of habits and demands of my workspace while I'm in the lab, some of which make a lot of sense, and some of which make none at all.
For one, I'm fixated on having a clean work area. I like having what tools I'm using organized, I hate it when dust piles up.
I also really hate it when the lab in general is messy, and I'll usually try to clean it before I even start working on my own project if it's at the point where it distracts.
I have a couple dental tools that I almost have to have every time I work, because they're new and wonderful and get stuff done.
Lately, whenever I work on cleaning my Green River fish, I tend to have headphones on, playing music. Oftentimes this is to counteract the sound of an air scribe or just keep me entertained during the interludes between groups of visitors who stop to ask questions (beyond an inquiry for the restrooms). I slide the headphones off whenever visitors come up to the windows, but when I've got nowhere to focus my attentions but my fish, the headphones are on and playing loudly.
I've discovered that it's way too much fun to listen to soundtrack music while cleaning my specimen, because it's very hard to not feel incredibly cool when you've got music from Inception or Lord of the Rings playing as you work away at a slab of fossilized bone and limestone under the microscope. At least it makes every little bit of dust scraped away by the dental tools actually seem significant. Everything is significant to soundtrack music.

Agwē Update #2

Hi all!

Not too much to report on Agwē (my Green River fish) this week; I've spent a large amount of time instead this week writing a "test SOP" on how to make Acryloid B-72 glue. This guide has pictures and required materials and instructions and so on, and I'm really hopeful that making these SOPs for the equipment and various procedures in the lab will be helpful for people working in Prep Lab when they need a reference for how something works or how something is done!
That's the hope, anyway. I'm optimistically looking forward to seeing how this comes together.
But in any case, that did take up a lot of time and limited my attention to Agwē. Still! I managed to unearth the first vertebrae and the surrounding area almost completely, which is really exciting! He might actually have a visible spine before the summer's out (man, I hope so)!

I've decided to proceed without using any sort of acid on the limestone-- I think I'd like to, but I just don't know how it'd work, so we'll have to see how using the dental tools works on the very hard-to-reach places along the spine and ribs.
And, I have to test out my new super, super thin Acryloid! Paleo Bond was looking too thick, so I mixed my own glue in the hopes of better preserving the detail on the bones. Fingers crossed!

~Becca

Becca here again!

Really alternatingly busy week in Prep Lab! Biggest part of my week was actually dedicated to the Scanning Electron Microscope, which was in use this past Wednesday-- not by me, obviously (wah), but by the Institute.
However! My role in the use of the SEM was purely custodial, in getting the lab ready to roll by dusting it down so the microscope didn't suffer any damage via wayward miscreant dust. I decided this merited cleaning the lab within an inch of its metaphorical life and spent a large chunk of Tuesday dusting, scrubbing, sweeping, and vacuuming. It's actually insane how much dust there was in odd places like on top of cabinets and on the sides of things like the dust collector (irony upon irony). Then again, it's amazing how much dust gets kicked up in here in one day's worth of work-- as I can see right now, two days after cleaning the lab, with it already looking as dusty as if I'd never cleaned up.
Oh well. More to clean?
So to all of you amazing volunteers who take it upon themselves to help keeping the museum looking beautiful-- you guys are totally awesome. Because it is so much work.
But I take a very weird sort of pride in making the Prep Lab look good, so then again, I suppose I don't actually mind at all.

Agwē Update #1

Becca here!
Progress this week with my fish fossil, Agwē~

Agwē as of 19 July 2012

 I've been focusing on cleaning and gluing the head especially around the jaw so far. It's the most-finished part of the fossil, so I wanted to do final touches and use the penetrant stabilizer glue (as Mike suggested) to make sure that, while I'm working on the rest of Agwē, his head stays in one nice unbroken piece.

Red circle indicates where most of my attention has been concentrated...

I'm planning on moving on to the actual vertebrae starting next week, and with luck, that'll go swimmingly (ack, fish pun). The glue seemed to work really well in holding everything together, and I think I'm getting the hang of the tools now. So progress is made! On to the spine!

I've been considering trying out diluted HCl (10%) to clear some of the limestone, but I've never tried this before. Thoughts?

Summer Volunteer Picnic at the CNC

We had our Summer Picnic last night. I think I am just recovering from the planning and celebration. I had a great time. The volunteers at the Museum and Nature Center are just great! It was fun talking with everyone. Sorry I was busy organizing things, I wasn't able to meet with everyone. I wanted your picnic to go off without a hitch. The staff at the CNC were great hosts I had a wonderful  time. Thanks to everyone; Those volunteers who were able to come, the staff who helped with food and setup, you are all great. I am so grateful I am part of your family. Sorry I was too busy to take pictures so no visuals just memories and plans for next year. Congrats to the 100 club and the KDT volunteers. Have a great summer y'all!

Introducing Agwē (also known as my fish)

Hi again! Becca here!

As requested, here's a photo of the current state of my Green River fish.
He (as I have hysterically named this thing Adalstien Hamish Agwē, because "Adalstien" means "noble rock" and "Agwē" means "demon fish" in old Norse, and Hamish is just a cool middle name [I'm not crazy, I promise!]) has had two students work on him before me, and has incomplete provenance in terms of where he's from, what he is, or what happened to his tail-- but! He's a lot of fun to work on.

Looks like he has some damage from an air abrasive tool, and the bone itself is very brittle, so I'm chipping away at the rock around very slowly, cleaning out the limestone around his vertebrae especially. I have a number of dental tools that I tend to favour. I'm also experimenting with using Paleo Bond on the weaker, cleaned areas of Agwē here, which seems to work well. But I'm hesitant to do so, simply because there's still so much to clean!

I'm open to any and all tips on how best to proceed!

Hi all! Becca from Prep Lab again~!

I've discovered in the last week that one of my favourite aspects of working in Prep Lab is when people ask questions. Specifically, when kids ask questions. More specifically, when kids ask questions and get beyond excited about the answer.

Some days it's next to impossible to get visitors at the window asking about the specimens or the equipment or the hours or anything else in the lab. Or it's impossible to hold people's interest for more than a few minutes before they're off again chasing little toddlers or simply moving on to the next exhibit.
Other days, I'm admittedly totally overwhelmed by the number of people dropping by and asking questions. And I prefer it that way (more funny stories, anyway~)!

Today, a little boy wandered up to the Prep Lab window and looked around. I said hi and pointed out some of the cool stuff in the lab-- he was particularly curious about the Apatosaurus vertebrae -- and it wasn't long before he asked the ever-popular question, "How long does it take to finish cleaning one of these fossils?"
I told him it'd taken two years to get the Apatosaurus vertebrae about halfway out of the rock so far.
His reaction?
He screamed and ran away, hopping up and down, dragging his parents over to the window from where they'd been in the next room, demanding they look at two years'  worth of work and himself completely overwhelmed at the concept that anyone could actually work on something for two years. He was very insistent that "that's crazy!" and kept asking, "How do you DO that?", meaning work for that long on anything (because he made it very clear that two years is basically an eternity).
Very slowly, is the best answer I could come up with.

I've decided I really love it when kids have questions. Adults who visit the museum are very polite and curious and ask some really brilliant questions, but kids are the only ones who will scream and run around in excitement as if your patience is superhuman.
Which, I suppose, it is. I mean, really, people work on one specimen for years? That's crazy!

~Becca

Prep Lab News

Hi all! Becca here from Prep Lab!
This has been my first week working in Prep Lab, and I love it. I've been working on finding material safety data sheets on all of the fancy chemicals here in the lab, and checking out all of the nifty things here and in the rest of the museum.

Just the other day I was issued a fossil to work on in Prep Lab. I was incredibly excited about this, since I've never gotten to work on actual prep before-- I was restricted to putting education collection labels on specimens when I was last here, which is still fun but a lot less glamourous. I'm moving up! I was one of three who went through Prep Lab orientation this time around, and we've all gotten our specimens and are joining the ranks of really dedicated people working on this stuff.
To everyone out there who has worked on prepping a specimen before--- I applaud your ridiculously amazing amount of patience. It's a ton of fun getting to actually work on a specimen so that it's finished enough to actually be put on display, be used in the collection, or even just be discernible from the rock it's in, but I keep looking at this Green River fish I've taken on after a solid three or even four hours of work to find I've barely cleared a section the size of my pinky fingernail. If that. Probably less, actually. But then again, I'm just a beginner at this and I'm incredibly timid with the hand tools. I don't even dream of trying the air scribes or the really intimidating equipment.
Still. It's actually oddly relaxing? Slowly working away at this slab of limestone and watching the little details of the fish appear. You have to be so focused on everything that before you know it a few hours have passed. Kind of awesome, right? Slow, but awesome.
So, I'll probably be here for a while chipping away at my fish, every day successfully losing track of time as I desperately try to unearth at least one more itty-bitty vertebrae before the day is out.

~Becca

Museum Heat

I know you are all enjoying the weather. I can't believe all the wonderful sunshine we have been having. I always love to see my dormant plants awake in the Spring but I can't help but worry about getting that last frost which may destroy my tender plants. But not just plants are wilting. We at the museum have decided not to turn off the heat (it is only Mid-March)and start the air conditioning. So I am learning all about solar heating. When I arrive in the morning the museum has cooled and work is comfortable. But now, around 4:30 it is literally steaming in the museum. I love all these wonderful windows. I enjoy watching visitors come up excited to the museum and look into the windows with wonder as they see our whale for the first time. Usually I enjoy sitting at the front desk greeting visitors but today I am wilting. My only volunteer in the museum is Frank Kozlowski. If you haven't met him,he is a wonderful volunteer. He comes in every Thursday with a smile and some wonderful new tidbit of information for me. It brightens my day when he walks into the office. He is what I wish for every one of the volunteers here. He has found what he loves to do and enthusiastically shares it with us and the visitors. I just hope he hasn't melted down there in the museum today. As for most beautiful Ithaca days, we have had few visitors.The few who have visited are probably not even noticing the heat because Frank is most likely helping them learn some new aspect of Earth's History. I will have to Thanks Frank, and all of you for making my job so enjoyable even in the heat. 
Lastly, make sure you come by the Cayuga Nature Center for Maple Fest this weekend. Jaime is rumored to be coming to sell her wares. You can say Hi, enjoy some fantastic pancakes, and revel in Ithaca's sweet nature!

Today is the last of the Winter Free Days. I have a few more volunteers in the museum helping out. Last month we had more than 400 visitors in one day, which is a lot for this small museum. It is a different crowd who visit on these free days. It is a diverse group. From visitors who are very into the science but are unable to visit because of not being able to pay for admissions. There are families from the community who enjoy having the opportunity to visit the museum because it is free. But unfortunately there are visitors who expect everything while they are here; very demanding. I think their attitude is, "You should be happy we are coming to this museum today even though it isn't important to us." I like the first two groups and could do without the last. I guess you have to take the bad with the good. I hope to take some time to encourage science and natural history education while we have these visitors. Sometimes the only time I will be able to have contact with them. This museum is such a great resource and I am glad we have the opportunity to reach this part of the public. Our volunteers make it happen!

Girl scout overnight

What happens at night in a museum? A group of Girl Scouts are about to find out. Normally when I leave the museum in the evening it is quiet ant kind of spooky. Tonight it is fun and the air is filled with anticipation of the night ahead. I have been greeting the girls and their leaders as they drag their sleeping bags and air mattresses down the ramp for a night at the Museum of the Earth. They have been changing into their pjs and texting on their phones. Some things change at sleep overs phones are new but giggling girls are not. Johanna has planned a night full of activities from whale info science table to making ice cream. I have my girls Elizabeth and Maria here helping out. I love to share my volunteering with my family as well as yours. It is quieting down, most of the girls have arrive, and I will be needed in another part of the museum. We have another one of these overnights coming up in April.You as volunteers dont' have to stay all night just experience the fun!

Art has always been a part of the museum’s focus but I feel sometime it gets lost among all the science. I interviewed one of our younger volunteers. She has been coming almost every Sunday for a couple of hours to help out in the Discovery Labs since fall of 2011. This volunteer has shared her talent with the museum. She has helped Majia with “Drawing through Time” and she has recently started helping me make new coloring pages for the Dino Lab. She is a very bright and talented young women who I feel will do well in her future endeavors. But I found out there is much more to this volunteer than an H2 pencil.

Phoebe Shalloway – Fossil Lab docent: “I volunteer at the museum because I always liked it and felt it was the perfect way to help with my college entrance.”

Phoebe is a native Ithacan and is a sophomore attending Ithaca High School. She is an only child and is disappointed she has not been able to have a pet. When I asked her why, she sadly explained her father was allergic to every animal that has ever existed! As for her future, like most young people, Phoebe couldn’t decide on one career. She hopes to be an author, or maybe, a marine biologist. I did tell her, you actually do a boatload of writing as a scientist; so maybe both careers are still a possibility. Her college career hasn’t started, and it probably is a bit early, but she did say her hopes for college right now would be Brown University. A lofty aspiration, but I was not surprised after talking with Phoebe. This young volunteer doesn’t sit around much. When I asked her what she liked to do as a hobby, she couldn’t say just one thing. She enjoys reading and named several science fiction/ fantasy books as her favorite. I felt like I was torturing her to pick just one. It is really nice to hear a teenager talk so excitedly about books. She also loves movies and her dream vacation involves one of her favorite books and movies, Lord of the Rings. She wants to travel to New Zealand to visit and watch the new Hobbit movie being made. I could definitely relate to that, a visit to Hobbiton would be wondrous.  She also said she would also love to see Greece because it looks so beautiful. Phoebe seems to follow her own path in music, saying she really doesn’t like any of the pop music today.

One of her talents we have seen at the museum is art. Phoebe’s drawings for the new coloring pages are fantastic. She has created six drawings of Mesozoic animals that we will incorporate into informational coloring pages. I am so impressed with the talent of our volunteers. They give of their time and go over what is expected of them when I ask. It is unbelievable and provides me with great pleasure. You definitely make my life easy. I stumped Phoebe when I asked her about her favorite food. I assumed every young person knew what their favorite food was, but all Phoebe could come with was bread; Bread? I have to admit I like bread, but your favorite food? She had no problem telling me all the things she did when she wasn’t in school or volunteering. She plays drums and takes a writing class. She is an amazing young person. She loves learning languages which lead to her fantasy life of traveling the world. I know she will be moving on to other pursuits in time but it has been a pleasure to have Phoebe as a volunteer at the museum. If you see her, ask her about her latest book.

Science, to me  is  …  trying to figure things out.

I was at my desk yesterday, in the museum office- for those not familiar with its location. It has moved from Jaime's old place facing the wall to right at the door. I get to be the first to greet anyone entering the lab. It is also more difficult to get in without my knowing since I now face the window. Well when we first moved the desk I felt like a had a responsibility to be a "receptionist" to the office. So I placed a candy bowl for all to use. I thought people might be drawn into the office with a sweet treat. For the first couple of months it had been filled with peppermints. I warned everyone that I consider February the chocolate month so Wednesday, February 1, I dumped a bag of chocolate into the bowl. Johanna was aghast! I thin she felt I had insulted her. Well to counteract my generosity to all and Johanna's waist, she promptly set her scale, she had conveniently in the office, in front of the candy dish. And there it stays. I recommend everyone come and get a piece of chocolate and chart your weight. Or not, anyway I would love to see you.

This has been so much fun talking to the volunteers. I am not the best interviewer, but so far my subjects have been very patient. This post is about a volunteer I have known for four years but I really haven’t “known” her well. We have been working together more since I have started working at the museum and I have really enjoyed developing our relationship. She is very intelligent and witty. She has a wonderful story and life; I hope I can do it justice.

Janice Brown: Fossil Lab Volunteer

I volunteer because I have a passion for geology and environmental science. I love educating and talking to people about science.

Janice, with fellow volunteer Lenore, doing what she does best, educating the museum visitors.

Janice’s life started in central New York, Syracuse to be exact. She attended North Syracuse High School hoping to be an anthropologist. She had always been fascinated with fossils even though her father hoped she would choose a more lucrative career. Haven’t we heard that before in this field? Early in her college career she attended Morrisville Ag & Tech for two years before heading to Cornell, where she worked as a lab tech in the Food Science department. She worked her way through her bachelors until it was time to get her masters. She was hired in the Microbiology Department of Food Science because of her enormous background she had acquired over the years, not needing to pursue her masters. She won the endowed Chair position of Louis Pasteur Senior Lecturer of Food Science. She stayed at Cornell until she recently retired. She even stayed on for another year and a half until her department found her replacement. And now knowing Janice better, I am sure it was difficult to find someone as passionate and knowledgeable as she. Whenever she would talk about working with the college students, a smile would come over her face. I could understand why she stayed in one place for so long. There is a deep love of what she did; from the students to the science.

           

Janice is not all about work though. She has the same passion for her family as she does for science. She loved talking about her family. Her son Philip has 2 children and her adopted daughter Brenda Lee has a son Dylan, who is often in Janice’s conversation. She had volunteered in Dylan’s 1^st and 2^nd grade classes. Janice talks adoringly about her family, even her 4 legged ones. She has a special place for Golden Retrievers and worked with the SPCA for 3 years as adoption coordinator and foster parent. She does not have Goldens at this time; her last, Dustin, passed not too long ago. But she wanted to let me know her furry family was not restricted to dogs. She has a bookful of funny and endearing stories of her Manx cat Luke. When she is not playing with her grandchildren or volunteering Janice is reading, her fave being Sci Fi, and munching on her favorite food of spicy salsa and chips. With the emphasis on spicy!

Summers are spent at the lake and with family now that she is retired. But when I asked her where would she like to go on her dream vacation she answered that she had already done that. It was to Ireland, which she has been lucky to do twice! She described her first trip as a very intimate one. She was able to stay with a couple she had met at Cornell. All the great places she visited, with real natives, too fun! She would describe it as “really wonderful!” I guess I didn’t know Janice too well, because I was a bit shocked at the story she told me about wanting to visit one of the old pubs. Great story, I will let her tell you sometime. Janice has been a treasure to this institution for over 4 years now and with her dedication she has shown over the years, I truly hope she will stay with us for a long time. She has volunteered mostly in the Fossil Lab. But it isn’t that simple. She has literally kept that lab going over the years by collecting shale and storing it at her house. She has now taken it on herself to help us update the lab manual in the Discovery Labs. See what I mean about indispensable. I have been recently working with Janice through the Junior Paleontologist Program which is being developed by volunteers at the Museum of the Earth. She has been a great addition to the team. I look forward to her adding her unique talents to the program. She is an unbelievably dedicated person and I have been lucky to be part of her life.

So Janice, Thanks…

 “Science to me is our salvation! We have to get a better handle on what is happening around us.”   Amen to that, Janice.

Welcome back all you Volunteers! I am going to make an effort to update this blog so you will feel more inclined to frequent it and maybe contribute. I know Jaime had hoped to create an online community among all the volunteers and I think she had the right idea. Looking back over my time as a volunteer, one of my greatest enjoyments was to interact with other volunteers. I loved science and I loved the museum setting but I truly loved sharing with other volunteers. When you volunteer at PRI, you often find you are by yourself and, I think, that will eventually diminish your enjoyment. I think you start to lose the attraction to volunteering if you can’t share with others. So I am back to this blog. I am going to be interviewing the volunteers, and maybe the staff, and publish it in the blog. This should accomplish two things. I will get to know each of you better and you will get to know each other and grow as a community. My first victim is Mike Marano. He has been one of my fellow volunteers who have never wavered to help me or the museum when we needed him. Usually we are working at our allotted volunteer jobs so I have never gotten to know him better so now we all will. Sit back and enjoy.

                                         Mike working on the Stegosaurus vertebrae in Prep Lab.

Mike Marano: Prep Lab volunteer. “I volunteer because it lets me do paleontology and educate people.”

Mike was born in Marathon, NY and grew up as the older brother to his 2 brothers and sister. He attended Marathon HS and seemed to always desire a career in Paleontology. But as many of us, he had to pay the bills and spent most of his life working in industry. He worked at Les Strom for 2 years as a laborer, but now he is at BorgWarner in Ithaca. He has worked there for 8 years as a tension assembler. He told me he likes to make everyone tense at work so I guess he is doing his job well. One of the things he has done is write a letter to BorgWarner, as an employee and MotE volunteer, asking for them to support PRI. I have also seen him come in blurried-eyed after a night shift just to sit in the museum to watch-over a new exhibit. Since he officially started in 2008, he has volunteered in almost every capacity for the museum.  He has worked in every Discovery Lab and the Prep Lab. In the Prep Lab, he is our “go-to guy.”  In fact right now he is the head preparator of the Carnegie Loan.  “What is that?” you ask. Well, stop by the Prep Lab Friday mornings and he would love to educate you on all things Dinosaurs and maybe teach you something about the Morrison Formation. As for educating, he has also volunteered to help with school groups and scout troops visiting the museum. He has even gone out of his way to educate a certain volunteer coordinator about synapsids. He also volunteers at remote sites. He was especially helpful at the State Fair. He said he loved talking to State Fair visitors about NY state geology and paleontological history. (and the corndogs and free admission weren’t bad either!)

     When Mike isn’t working or volunteering he stays busy. He of course loves to fossil collect (but who doesn’t) and he also enjoys golf and building models esp. ship, cars and tanks. The last choice stems from a family of Marines. He can talk military history with the best of them. I have learned more about military planes from Mike in an hour than I did all my life.  Music is another of Mike’s passions. He is open to many types but he had to mention a certain guitarist, Desire Bassett, he found on the internet. She is definitely most impressive. I think guitar music might be closest to his heart. When I asked Mike what was favorite food, he quickly answered, “Anything Italian.” Of course, what would you expect coming from someone named Marano?

     “Morocco” was his answer to my question of his dream vacation. Many of you may wonder about that answer but I know where he was going with that. We both just sat in silence shaking our heads for a few moments, thinking about the next great dinosaur discovery that might be coming out of those deserts.  I asked Mike what would he rather be doing than his present job and he quickly said that he would love to be a field paleontologist.  What a surprise! No wonder he is here volunteering. It is great to be able to volunteer somewhere that allows you to do and share your passion!

My last question to him, and believe me he was happy about it, was for him to complete a statement.

“Science, to me, is…. Discovery!”

Way to go Mike, thanks for being my first guinea pig!