Imagine yourself standing on an eroding grassy hill, looking across a harsh landscape of rocky gullies. Shielding your eyes from the hot Montana sun, you swipe away the sweat slowly dripping down the side of your face as you reach down into the dust and the dirt, and suddenly, your fingers touch a hard object. Just another rock? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s something else?
This was my extraordinary experience in Montana’s badlands, the summer of 1989, when I discovered my first dinosaur bone.
Digging dinosaurs at the excavation site of Jurassic Park’s real paleontologist not only inspired my innovative way of teaching; it sparked a passion for adventure that has taken me all over the world.
From backpacking and whitewater rafting through the Grand Canyon, riding camels around the pyramids of Egypt, exploring the tombs of the pharaohs, to hot-air ballooning over the Massai Mara in Tanzania, looking down over a herd of elephants, I’ve used these experiences to inspire my students to become courageous adventurers, growing in confidence, self-reliance, and resilience.
So, let’s travel back in time to how I earned my nickname, Dino Diane. I was teaching science in Arizona when the movie Jurassic Park came out, and I fell in love with those dinosaurs. I learned that the main character, Dr. Alan Grant, was actually inspired by a real paleontologist named Jack Horner. Now, my father, who has always been very supportive of me, found an ad in the back of a National Geographic, inviting people to dig dinosaurs at Horner’s excavation site. He called it Camposaur. So, I packed my backpack, and I went digging for dinosaurs.
A journalist visiting the site one hot afternoon heard all this commotion coming from the far end of the dig. Well, I had just uncovered a Maiasaura femur; that’s the thigh bone of a dinosaur. Can you imagine? A shudder coursed through my entire body as I realized that this Maiasaura didn’t know it at the time, but we would be meeting like this, eighty million years later.
When the journalist asked me what my name was, a co-digger blurted out, “Why, that’s Dino Diane!” and the name stuck and became the nickname of the main character and the title of my book series, Dino Diane’s Adventures.
