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Dinosaur expert Kristi Curry Rogers has been focused on fossils since first grade.
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BY | JEANNIE OUELLETTE
One fateful Wednesday in 1980, 6-year-old Kristi Curry squirmed excitedly in her desk in a first-grade classroom in Sikeston, Missouri. Her teacher was about to pass out that week’s issue of Weekly Reader, and Curry looked forward to losing herself in the stories inside the national magazine for schoolchildren. On that particular day, she read a story that changed her life.
“It was written by Jack Horner, who is now a celebrity paleontologist.
He’s the real-life scientist that the Jurassic Park character is based on,” Mac Professor Kristi Curry Rogers recalls now in her campus office, where skulls and specimen jars share shelf space with books and photographs.
Horner’s Weekly Reader article mesmerized her as a young student
with a topic most kids love: babies. He’d written about his discovery of the first dinosaur eggs and embryos in the Western Hemisphere, on Egg Mountain in Montana. The discovery established
Horner’s career, and settled questions of whether some dinosaurs were sociable, built nests, and cared for their young. Horner and his partner named the new dinosaur genus Maiasaura, meaning “good mother lizard.”
“I was stunned to think about dinosaurs looking after their young,” Curry Rogers remembers. “I had only thought of dinosaurs
as cold-blooded, dim-witted creatures to be feared. But to think of them as good parents . . . how cool is that?”
The first-grader bounded home from school and let loose a torrent of dinosaur questions that never ended. At first, her parents
encouraged her. “My dad was especially supportive, because he was interested himself,” she says. “We’d get books and articles and watch specials on public television.” Eventually, though, she wanted to search for real fossils. “When I was in seventh grade, I wrote to a professor at the nearest university, asking about excavation
work and where to find fossils. He wrote back and offered to meet me.” Curry and her father drove to the campus, and came away with a carefully marked map of the best nearby fossil-finding sites. Many hours of father-daughter amateur fieldwork followed.
Around the same time, Curry saw an announcement for a Girl Scout summer camp, a program of Montana State University and the Museum of the Rockies, in which 16- to 18-year-old girls could do hands-on work at a real excavation site. Even better, her old hero, Jack Horner, also worked at those institutions and was associated
with the camp. At 14, though, Curry was too young to participate. “My parents made me a deal: If I stayed in Girls Scouts and the camp came around again, they’d let me go.”
The camp did come around again, the summer before Curry’s senior year, and her parents kept their word—although they made their daughter pay her own way, which she did by washing cars and giving baton-twirling lessons. Finally, she was off to Montana for a real dinosaur dig.
“My parents hoped I’d come back cured,” she laughs. “They were starting to worry about when I would grow out of the idea of paleontology as a career. They didn’t see it as a realistic future for me. They’d say, ‘You wouldn’t like it. You don’t like to get dirty, you don’t like to be hot, you sunburn like crazy, this isn’t the life for you.’ So the main reason they let me go to dinosaur camp was to end this obsession.”
That plan backfired magnificently. Curry
loved everything about the camp, and when she returned to Missouri she began sending letters back to Montana in hopes of securing a job for the following summer.
“My mind was made up,” says Curry Rogers. “I was going back to Montana after graduation to work at the camp. I was going
to meet Jack Horner, convince him to give me a job in his department, pay my way at Montana State University, and pursue
my dream of paleontology.”
She got hired on as kitchen help at the camp and it was then, her second summer in Montana, when Curry finally met Jack Horner. “He stuck out his hand by way of introduction, and I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “He gave me this limp, cold fish handshake! And since my dad had always carefully instructed me in how to present
myself, I blurted out, ‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to shake hands?’ And Jack Horner said, ‘I guess not.’ So I demonstrated
a proper handshake. And then I was mortified, convinced that I’d ruined my plan to impress this man.”
Two weeks later, when Curry spotted
Horner at a public lecture, she tried to slip past him unnoticed, but he called out, “Haven’t we met before?” and stuck out his hand again. This time his handshake was firm. “You’ve been practicing,” Curry said. Before the conversation was over, she had landed a job in Horner’s research department
and was on her way toward a biology degree from Montana State University.
That first degree was soon followed by a PhD in anatomical sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, which Curry chose “expressly because
my mentor would be a woman, and from the time I was a kid I just hadn’t seen that many women working in this field.” Mentor Cathy Forster was open-minded about how Curry would focus her research, and strongly encouraged her to do fieldwork.
“In fact, Cathy gave me my first key opportunities and taught me how to do international fieldwork, where sometimes you just have to wait until the tribal elder says it’s okay to go out.”
Today there are a few more women in paleontology, due in part to a small group who’ve paved the way. That includes Forster and Curry Rogers, whose early fieldwork together in Madagascar led to the discovery of a skeleton of a new species of titanosaur (among the giants of the dinosaur world), the first recovered almost perfectly intact with its skull still attached to its body. Curry Rogers named her newly discovered species—now known as Rapetosaurus—“mischievous giant lizard.” The Rapetosaurus skeleton is currently mounted at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.
Fieldwork has since taken Curry Rogers from Madagascar to
Montana and museum studies have taken her across the United States and to places as far-flung as Romania.
But it was love that brought her to Minnesota. “Ray and I met on the Mahajanga Basin Project in Madagascar,” she explains about her marriage to Macalester geology professor Ray Rogers. By their second expedition together they had become friends. “When the expedition was over,” says Curry Rogers, “we went on two dates and got married.” Ray was already established at Macalester, so Minnesota became the couple’s home.
Soon Curry Rogers was working at the Science Museum of Minnesota
as a curator, and later started guest teaching at Macalester, offering
a popular class on dinosaurs. When last year she was faced with deciding between teaching and curating, she says, “I found that I just didn’t want to give up teaching or research.”
Last fall Curry Rogers joined the Macalester biology department as a full-time professor. She balances teaching with mothering 5-year-old Lucy, once again breaking ground by bringing the small girl (who prefers
princesses to dinosaurs) on fieldwork expeditions. “Last summer she canoed with us 50 miles down the Missouri River and paddled the whole way,” says Curry Rogers.
In the classroom, it’s the enthusiasm and creativity of Mac students
that inspires Curry Rogers most. She says her group of first-year seminar students studying biodiversity and evolution “bring so much passion to the topic, it’s a joy to go to class.”
Her 55-student dinosaur course, by contrast, fulfills a distribution requirement and thus attracts everyone from art majors needing a science
credit to biology majors intending to pursue careers in the field. “I essentially use dinosaurs to teach how science operates,” she says.
“Early on, paleontology was mostly about digging up bones because
there was so little to go on. Now it’s about looking deeply at the big story of evolution, of how dinosaurs lived and interacted. Everything
that’s a fossil is part of this context of the evolutionary history of life. That’s what’s inherently interesting to students—the idea of deep time, millions and billions of years, and how humans have had such a momentous impact in such a blip of time in the history of the earth.”
Predicting or understanding the impact of a moment in time is mysterious to be sure. But Curry Rogers’s parents—who today are delighted
with their daughter’s career path—must still marvel at the cascading
effects of a certain issue of Weekly Reader they have tucked away as a reminder of the day their daughter discovered dinosaurs.
Jeannie Ouellette is a Minneapolis writer.
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