Science in the Triangle

New Jersey isn’t exactly known for its ample fossil record. But that didn’t stop Brian Switek from doing everything he could to become an expert on the subject of paleontology.

Brian Switek

Over the years, he’s written the popular book Written in Stone, blogged at Wired Science’s Laelaps and Smithsonian Magazine’s Dinosaur Tracking and published papers in academic journals — all as a part-time pursuit. But this summer, he’s taking his full-time freelance show on the road, traveling west to Salt Lake City to get his hands dirty for a new book, A Date with a Dinosaur.

Although there’s no publication date set yet, Switek said he’s excited to get started on a title that will explore a few of paleontology’s biggest celebrities.

“A Date With a Dinosaur is about catching up with the prehistoric monsters I met as a child. Since the time I first encountered them, reconstructions of ‘Brontosaurus’, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Tyrannosaurus have changed so much, and so many new dinosaurs have been discovered that it is almost impossible to keep up with them all,” Switek said in a message Wednesday.

“Through these finds, we are finally starting to answer some of the big questions about dinosaur lives - what color were they? how fast did they grow? how did they reproduce? - but dinosaurs aren’t just scientific objects. They are also pop culture icons, and sometimes there’s resistance to scientific discoveries that change the dinosaurs we grew up with. A Date With a Dinosaur is about reconciling these views - pop culture dinosaurs with dinosaurs as paleontologists know them - in the hope that I can introduce readers to aspects of dinosaur lives they have never encountered before.”

I caught up with Switek in January at ScienceOnline 2011 in Durham to talk about how he boned up on his beloved field and what’s exciting him most about the world of dinosaurs.