How I came to write this book.
Most palaeontologists will tell you they arrived in their job because, as a child, they loved prehistoric creatures, particularly dinosaurs. They just never grew up – or at least they never stopped seeing a world filled with wonder and excitement. In that sense, I never grew up either. I never stopped being the little kid staring up in awe at the 32-metre-long fossil of ‘Dippy’ the Diplodocus that fills the vaulted Central Hall of London’s Natural History Museum.
I’ve long been in awe of the museum too, a grand cathedral to the natural world and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, all showcased in architect Alfred Waterhouse’s great neo-Romanesque confection of a building. The overall effect is one of Victorian grandeur, but with splendid detailing, right down to the gargoyles and statues of pterodactyls, cats, sabretoothed lions, wolves, bears and numerous other creatures both prehistoric and modern.
After childhood visits to the museum helped nurture a passion for all things dinosaur, many roads in my early life led back to that imposing Victorian building in London’s leafy suburb of South Kensington. The offices where my dad had his business were just around the corner, so as a teen I’d often pay visits, wandering the galleries or sitting out the front on the grass. When I started my degree in biology in 1996, I chose Imperial College, which lies right in the shadow of the museum.
While studying at Imperial, I spent some time volunteering in the museum press office. Then for my undergraduate project in my final year I spent a month in the mammal tower of the museum pulling out drawer after drawer of primate bones and measuring the skulls with calipers (my study didn’t come to any strong conclusions about the evolution of primate body size as it was supposed to, but I drank in the opportunity to rummage through the museum collections). The next year I decided to take a master’s degree at the museum itself, studying biodiversity, evolution and museum science.
Spending a year at the museum as a postgraduate was when I really grew to love the place. We had pretty much free rein behind the scenes, and I quickly came to realise that only a tiny fraction of the collections is on display. Most of the 70 million or so specimens (some of which were collected by Charles Darwin on the Beagle and by Joseph Banks, Captain Cook’s botanist on the 1768–71 voyage of the Endeavour) are squirrelled away in climate-controlled corridors and towers that sprawl on and on, like a miniature campus. I spent many a productive afternoon exploring the bowels of this fantastic institution.
When my studies concluded, I chose not to pursue the academic route, instead becoming a science and environment journalist. This gave me the opportunity to remain involved with the field I loved, but allowed me to constantly learn new things in many different avenues of science. I never stopped following the latest dinosaur discoveries, and continued to write about them whenever I could – some stories for National Geographic, others for New Scientist. But it was a feature story summarising all the many streams of evidence that birds are descended from dinosaurs, which appeared in Australia’s Cosmos magazine, that really allowed me to get stuck into the feathered dinosaurs topic. When this story appeared in an anthology of Australian science writing, and subsequent conversations revealed it was a topic that many people found intriguing but knew very little about, I had the idea to write this book.
Today I live in Sydney, where I’m the editor of Australian Geographic magazine. I still love to read, write and talk about dinosaurs whenever I get the opportunity (sometimes I even wear dinosaur pyjamas). Researching and writing this book has not only been fascinating, it’s been a lot of fun, and I’ve relished the opportunity to interview and correspond with many of the world’s top dinosaur scientists – in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Canada – and hear their incredible stories of discovery first hand.
Returning to the Natural History Museum in mid-2012 to begin the detailed research for this book brought back memories of my studies there more than a decade earlier, as well as my childhood visits. I was there to speak to dinosaur experts, but most importantly to take a look at a fossil replica of the famous ‘London specimen’ of the ‘first bird’, Archaeopteryx, which is on display in the museum’s galleries.
Archaeopteryx, discovered in 1861 in Germany, was the first substantial piece of evidence that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs – and it was where my research for this book fittingly began. When you start to think about the fact that birds really are living dinosaurs, you begin to see everything in a new light.