This is part of a series of the collected thoughts and sayings by influential members of the Johns Hopkins community. All the following quotes were taken verbatim from a personal interview with Dave Weishampel.
Dave Weishampel has been a professor of human anatomy at the medical school for 20 years. He is a professional paleontologist and researcher and the author of many books including The Dinosaur Papers and The Evolution and Extinction Dinosaurs. Weishampel has done fieldwork in Montana, Alberta, Canada, the Gobi Desert, Mongolia and Transylvania.
I grew up on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio certain that there was a dinosaur buried in my backyard. I'm sort of this Peter Pan character that never grew up. Kids start hitting the six, seven, eight year-old phase and it's all dinosaurs. Then people give it up because they move on to, probably, space travel or something like that. I did the space stuff as well, but I never gave up on the dinosaur stuff.
I liked it originally because I could draw and I liked to draw skeletons, it turns out, and try to understand what the animal would look like with its skin on. So I learned about muscles and skin and things that hang off of skeletons. I still do my own illustrations for my papers
How much do we really know about dinosaurs? Worldwide, I would say probably a tenth, could be known. My former advisor at Penn, Peter Dodson, has estimated that there is a discovery of a new dinosaur, a new genus of species about once every seven weeks. Some of it we'll never know because the rocks at the right time are not preserved, globally. So the business of having a new dinosaur every seven weeks is a testament to our strengths. The fact that we, as paleontologists, know that rocks don't sample all places at all times is something we just put in our back pocket and deal with.
I love fieldwork. Usually you're set up in the middle of nowhere, with no running water. You start really entrenching yourself and making a little village. You're sort of the mayor and the villagers are the people who come to do the fieldwork. It's quiet, its probably antithetical to most people's pleasures; you don't have a telephone; you don't have a TV. Coffee is the best, always, when you wake up in the morning, you walk outside and it's still cold, it smells like sage and the birds are out. Then you go and sit someplace else, digging out the stuff. There's the comraderie of the people who are doing it and it's always been a lot of fun.
I lived in a tipi in Montana for two months. I was working on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation with Jack Horner. Jack and his cohort were buying tipis, so I thought, "Oh, I'll buy a tipi." It was really nice, a real pleasure.
I'm not one of those gifted namers of dinosaurs. Most recently I named something called Zalmoxes. It's a fat, yet reasonably small, herbivorous dinosaur, also an ornithopod, and it comes from Transylvania. Zalmoxes was a major deity of the Dacian people, who are thought to be the original inhabitants of Transylvania. Zalmoxes advocated things like vegetarianism, and my guys a plant-eater, and he was supposed to be the god of the underworld, and we had to dig him up. It's a lovely guy. It was a real thrill. Transylvanian dinosaurs come out in dribs and drabs out of the rock and so it was really nice to be able to create the animal from isolated parts.
I would like to go back to the Gobi. It's this powerful feeling of being at the edge of the earth. There are no roads -- you're into the hinterland.
They are another world, they were on our same globe, but the ecosystems were entirely different for all the time that dinosaurs were around. So we can play around with that we can figure out the rules of biology, the rules of ecology, in the present day. But that doesn't exhaust the possibilities and I think dinosaurs and the Mesozoic itself proves that to be true. Some things are law-like and you can use them to help you understand the past and the present, but other things intervene as well, so that's why I remain interested.
Dinosaurs, except for birds, went out with a great kablang. Despite my interest in their biology, I do need to know what happened to them to help explain a variety of things, like the origin of modern mammals. It has been suggested that if dinosaurs hadn't croaked 65 million years ago there would be no primates, and if there were no primates there would be no us. It was just by chance that a few things got through, including placental mammals. So by luck or by skill, good genes or bad genes, we're here and dinosaurs aren't.
