Matthew Bonnan is a vertebrate paleobiologist and an Associate Professor
of Biology at Stockton University in New Jersey. His research focuses on the
evolution of locomotion in sauropod dinosaurs and more broadly on the evolution
of forelimb posture in reptiles, birds, and mammals. His research combines
traditional anatomical approaches with computer-aided modeling, and recently
XROMM (X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) to reconstruct the
three-dimensional movements of limb bones in live mammals and reptiles. He
lives in Hammonton, New Jersey, with wife and fellow academic Jess
Bonnan-White, his two children, Quinn and Max, and several pets.
Question
1:
You are one of
my heroes in the field of paleontology. Who did you admire growing up?
Hi, Gary. I’m flattered to be considered someone’s hero – it’s an honor!
Have you met me? =) Growing up, I suppose several people who authored books on
science and paleontology would vie for that title, including Bob Bakker, Greg
Paul, and Carl Sagan. Honestly, though, it was Dougal Dixon who would prove to
be the most inspiring because he responded to a type-written letter I sent him.
I was thirteen and had read his book, Time
Exposure. In that book, he made the argument that Tyrannosaurus rex was probably not fast and likely a scavenger.
This did not sit well with me, and I wrote him, marshalling what data I could
from the books in my bedroom, to explain why he was wrong. He not only
responded, but was kind and encouraging even though he disagreed with some of
my “theories.” It taught me a valuable lesson – in science, we can disagree
without having to be disagreeable.
Question 2:
At what age did
you get inspired to pursue a career in paleontology?
I was five when I decided to be a paleontologist, but I don’t actually
know why I decided that – I didn’t
really have an “aha” moment like some people describe. Instead, I just got to
really liking dinosaurs and reptiles in general, and that was how it went. Also,
my fascination for dinosaurs waned like it does for many kids. Truth be told, I
was also very fascinated by sound effects in movies and how soundtracks are
edited. As a little kid, I would buy the records (I know, right, vinyl before
it was cool!) of movies like Star Wars
and listen to the music passages over and over until they were part of my DNA.
Then if I saw the movie again, I would mentally note how they changed the music
to fit a scene, and would try to replicate that on my cassette player at home.
In college, I even did a stint as a DJ and got to edit and remix music for a
show. I still do that as a hobby, so music production and editing might have
won out.
But in middle school, out of boredom, I picked up a book on a bookshelf
that Barrie Jaeger, a friend of my mother’s, had given me when I was five. It
was John C. McLoughlin’s book, Archosauria:
A New Look at the Old Dinosaur, and I was now old enough to read and
understand it. And it blew my little mind. Here were dinosaurs that could be
covered with feathers, or warm-blooded! His descriptions of herds of sauropods
being following theropods was just so arresting to my middle-school mind, and I
realized dinosaurs were actually pretty cool. It was around this same time that
the books by Bakker and Paul were published, and I read those cover to cover,
and was insanely jealous of the artwork. So, by the time I entered high school,
it was pretty clear I was going to be a paleontologist for real … at least in
my mind.
Question 3:
What was your
favorite dinosaur growing up? What dinosaur is your favorite now?
My favorite dinosaur growing up was Apatosaurus,
although I did like Deinonychus and Velociraptor before they were cool. =)
Something about sauropods was always fascinating – the size, the long necks,
the image of these giants migrating across the landscape. My favorite dinosaur
now is Aardonyx – I did help discover
and name it, so there is some bias there.
Question 4:
Paleontology is
such a diverse field these days involving many disciplines. What advice
would you give to an aspiring paleontologist today?
Paleontology is interdisciplinary, so you have to be flexible and open to
different experiences. I think it’s important to identify your strengths and
weaknesses and your likes and dislikes, and that’s why volunteering and
internships are so important. You will never understand any science until you
do it, so any experiences are valuable. For example, I think we give young
people a skewed idea of what modern paleontology is about. There’s this an
unspoken assumption that all of us are great in the field and spend every
summer digging out new specimens. Some of us certainly are, but I am not among
those who do. I found that anatomy and functional morphology (how the shape of
the skeleton informs us about how it works) were my strengths and where my
excitement in research lies. I have had the privilege of going to the field
many times, but my strength is not in geology and field work. The discovery of Aardonyx, for example, was a team
effort, and my role was assessing the anatomy and functional morphology of the
dinosaur. But other members of the team helped us figure out when in time it
was and the geological context – Johann Neveling, for example, is an
outstanding field geologist, and were it not for his expertise we might not
have any good idea about when and under what circumstances Aardonyxcame to be buried. Adam Yates is an outstanding taxonomist,
and so he was able to establish the species based on his expertise. And we were blessed to work with
AnusuyaChinsamy-Turan who did the bone histology work which showed us Aardonyx was young and still growing. I
guess what I’m getting at is that modern paleontology is diverse and requires
integrated teamwork. Ideally, you all bring your joy and expertise to a problem
or project, and the end result is bigger and better than the sum of its parts.
I suppose my strongest advice is go where the opportunities are and study
the things that fewer people are looking at. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself too
early and be flexible. There are so many things to study, and a great strategy
is to study the organisms that fewer people are interested in at that time. In
this way, you become a rare expert on a group of organisms or a part of their
anatomy that few other people are, and that opens doors because it makes you a
more valuable collaborator. As I found for myself, almost any organism or
anatomy or evolutionary history is bound to have mysteries and questions to
solve.
Question 5:
Going to
college these days and then on to grad school has become a daunting task.
Many people are unaware of how long it takes to make it to the finish
line. The rewards are great, but what would you say to someone pursuing
professional studies after college?
To me, the most difficult part of going to graduate school was watching
my peer group get jobs, settle down, have families, and all of that other life
stuff. I think it can be emotionally trying even if you are steadfast in your
pursuit of research and you are doing something you love. You’re spending most
of your 20s and in some cases part of your 30s earning very little, living
paycheck to paycheck, and playing a game of calculated risk. After a while, it
feels like your family and friends are looking at you like, “what are you doing
with their life?” Sometimes people tell you something like that to your face.
I wrote a recent blog post on this topic, so to reiterate that a bit, I
would say there is no one path to success. In the sciences, there can be this
unspoken (or spoken) assumption that success is defined narrowly by landing a
research job in a big lab with lots of graduate students. But there are many
opportunities for those who can combine teaching and research. And you often
end up working in teams these days, so many of us partner with different people
in different labs or field stations, collaborating to use all sorts of
equipment and supplies that would not be available to any one individual.
The good news is, once you manage to land a professorship, you often find
that you will catch up with and in some cases surpass your peer group in terms
of the life stuff. But there is no doubt going to graduate school is a
difficult choice and a commitment. This is why you have to love what you do to
get you through the difficult and financially poorer times. And to come full
circle back to being flexible, don’t limit yourself in terms of what jobs you
will or won’t take. Certainly, know your value and be true to yourself, but if
you only wait for a particular type of position, you are often severely
limiting your job prospects.
Question 6:
What was or is
your favorite research project? What are some of your current projects?
I suspect I am like a lot of scientists I know in that the current
project tends to be the favorite project because that is where your mental
energies and excitement are directed. To be fair, the discovery and description
of Aardonyx was a highlight I will
forever treasure. But since graduate school I have had nagging questions about
forelimb posture in dinosaurs that were just not getting answered to my
satisfaction using shape analysis and anatomical study. I felt I had sort of
reached the end of what I could learn with morphometrics and comparative
anatomy about four or five years ago, and wanted to do something I had always
dreamed of doing since graduate school: x-ray movies of live reptiles and birds
to see how their bones moved when they were alive.
I am grateful to Beth Brainerd, Stephen Gatesy, David Baier, Peter
Falkingham, and the XROMM practitioners at Brown University for providing an
unbelievable opportunity to learn their technique. For those who don’t know,
XROMM allows you to reconstruct three-dimensional moving X-rays of live animal
skeletons! One of the lessons that has slowly but surely sunk into my head is
that when doing science, especially something new to you, start simple and get
complex over time. Ideally, doing X-ray movies of alligators would have been
fantastic, but the logistics of doing that right off the bat would have been
daunting and dangerous. But then it occurred to me that forelimb posture in
early mammals is debated (it seems early mammals had a less-than-erect forelimb
posture), and so far as I could tell there were few studies on live bone
movements (in vivo kinematics) on rat
forelimbs. So what I’ve been up to the past three years has been learning XROMM
and filming and analyzing rat forelimb skeleton movements. And it’s been
fascinating. And I can’t say too much more because we’ve got a paper on this
very thing that will come out sometime later this year, so you can all find out
then.
I was fortunate in the meantime to receive internal support and support
from various New Jersey funding streams to begin assembling my own XROMM lab at
Stockton! Our lab director, Justine Ciraolo, is just the best and has been so
supportive in getting our lab setup. It
helps as well to work with an amazingly friendly and helpful animal caretaker,
John Rokita. I also have this fantastic physics colleague, Jason Shulman, who
has been a great collaborator – there’s a lot of physics involved with any
analysis of movement! We (my undergraduate students and I) currently have
bearded dragons and monitor lizards, and we’re training those to run on a
treadmill – that’s so they stay in front of cameras and X-ray equipment long
enough to capture their step cycles. Yes, I know, lizards are not archosaurs
and they’re not anywhere close to the size of sauropods, but they are in the
size range of many of the early ancestors of dinosaurs and the earliest
archosaurs had a non-erect forelimb posture. So we’ll see what we find. Bone
form and function go together, and my hope is that once we learn more about how
the bones of the forelimb move in living reptiles, we can compare the shapes to
fossil reptiles and start putting some brackets on what was and was not
possible in terms of movement. It’s all very exciting for me!
Question 7:
Jurassic Park was the movie I remember as a kid that fueled my passion for dinosaurs.
What was your most memorable movie?
Honestly, it was
the Star Wars trilogy and the Indiana
Jones movies that were my favorites growing up, and Jaws was in there too. I was a bit too old for Jurassic Park to fuel my
passion, but I do remember being blown away by what were then amazing special
effects. But I was also interning for Jim Kirkland, Dinamation International
Society, and the Museum of Western Colorado that summer (1993), and so I was
already being skeptical about what was projected on the screen.
Question 8:
I remember
meeting my first professional paleontologist. Do you remember the first
paleontologist you ever met? Were you a nervous wreck?
I was in 6th or 7th grade when I met my first
paleontologists at the Field Museum in Chicago – I grew up in Roselle,
Illinois, which is in the Northwest suburbs around Chicago. I remember my mom
took to me to a special kid and adult event on dinosaurs at the Field Museum and
there was a lecture on dinosaurs by Bill Simpson and some other paleontologists
at the museum. I nervously raised my hand and asked a question about
coelurosaurs being related to birds (this was ~1986) and I was relieved that my
question was answered professionally and seriously! I think none of us realize the effect we have
on others and how what seem simple gestures at one time can have profound and
lasting impacts on someone’s life.
Question 9:
Dinosaurs and
the animals that lived at the same time as them were amazing creatures.
Why do you feel dinosaurs continue to fascinate us?
I think dinosaurs stir the wonder and mystery that enthralls all of us. A
dinosaur skeleton confronts you with the realization that on this same planet
were different times and pasts that were alien but also very, very real. It’s
that vertigo sense of deep time – that things have not been static but have and
continue to change. Dinosaurs put things in perspective – there is no such
thing as a typical time on Earth. I know
many paleontologists grow weary of answering questions about the death of the
dinosaurs (well, the non-avian dinosaurs), but I think that does play a role in
their popularity. Here you had these amazingly diverse and successful animals and
then in a geological blink they were gone, perhaps under fairly catastrophic
circumstances. If non-avian dinosaurs could go extinct, what about us? It’s
fairly deep and heady stuff.
As a kid in the 1980s, I “knew” that birds had to be dinosaurs from reading
books like Bakker’s Dinosaur Heresies,
and so I think what has been mind-blowing to see is how much the acceptance of
birds as dinosaurs has changed. When I was a Kindergartener in the 1970s,
everyone “knew” the dinosaurs were gone for good. Now, we see them all around
us – you can reach out and touch a live dinosaur! But I think it also shows us
that dinosaurs were animals, and to truly understand them, we have to
understand, preserve, and respect their living relatives and the great
diversity of creatures that we co-inhabit the planet with.
Question 10:
What is your
favorite time period?
Well, that’s a
hard one. Not too long ago I would have told you the Jurassic period because
that is when sauropods first became huge. But the Triassic is really pulling my
heartstrings lately –that’s when the forelimbs of dinosaurs and mammals began a
transition from a less to a more erect posture, and I want to know more about
that. The Cretaceous gets all the press,
and for many good reasons, but I have come to value the beginnings of the
Mesozoic to be equally intriguing because that is foundation upon which the
great Cretaceous diversity was built upon.
Question
11: Where can folks go to learn more
about your research?
You can also follow me on twitter: @MattBonnan
Question 12:
What’s your
favorite drink?
Bourbon and coke.
Gary: Thank you!
