New paleontology certificate coming to USU
In northeast Utah, a town sits perched amongst colorful, layered rock cliffs. This town, Vernal, is home to Utah State University’s Uintah Basin campus and is visited by renowned paleontologists and geologists who come to experience Utah’s affectionately named “Dinosaurland” and to teach.
One such paleontologist is Benjamin Burger, a professor at Utah State’s Uintah Basin Campus who teaches classes in geoscience. Burger stated it is a combination of Utah’s unique environment and plentiful sedimentary deposits that creates a perfect environment for the preservation of fossils in eastern Utah.
“We’re up on what we geologically call the craton, especially in eastern Utah. Basically, we’re towards the center of the continent. So, a lot of that sedimentary rock has been deposited and preserved,” Burger said. “Particularly, the Uintah mountain ranges have allowed a lot of those layers of rock to be pushed up from depth so we can actually study them on the surface.”
Utah in general, but especially Vernal is a desert environment, and therefore very exposed. Burger says this is helpful for studying the rock record and the fossils within it.
“It’s easy to study here because you don’t have to try to figure out what’s going on because everything’s kind of exposed, and you can see it at the surface,” Burger said.
Though eastern Utah has phenomenal conditions for fossil preservation, Chloe Danos, the head of Recruitment and Outreach on USU’s Logan campus, says fossil formation is still quite the puzzle.
Danos helps explains a concept in paleontology called preservation bias. An organism must beat a lot of odds such as decomposition and improper burial to become a fossil. Following becoming a fossil, it then must be exposed for a short enough period of time to retain its significant details before erosion takes its toll, but long enough for scientist to discover it.
“This thing had to die and not get eaten by other things. That way, you have the whole critter. Then it had to die in a convenient spot, and things just don’t die in convenient spots because there aren’t that many convenient spots. Then, that convenient spot had to be really convenient for a long time,” Danos said. “They then have to be buried deep enough that they get preserved, and they don’t decompose. Then, organic matter gets replaced with all sorts of cool minerals through groundwater.”
Though fossil formation is a complex process, it does not inhibit research and job demand. Burger says they still find fossils all the time, creating lots of jobs in the realm of geoscience.
“There is this conception out there that there aren’t very many jobs in paleontology, but with a lot of construction, a lot of land management issues, and with a lot of natural resources, they keep discovering new dinosaur bones whenever they’re building a road or things like that,” Burger said. “So there’s a lot of need for people that have that experience.”
USU Geology Department Head Dr. Joel Pederson says the misconception that there aren’t jobs in geology is one of the challenges the geology departments across the nation face.
“Don’t forget that geoscience exists,” Pederson said. “It’s a real struggle because there are few people who pursue it in college, and so there’s this big unmet demand. I think a lot of people who are into science probably originally loved dinosaurs, or they just loved collecting rocks. If anybody’s out there thinking about geoscience, go for it. It is the funnest, most hybrid applied science out there.”
To remedy this unmet demand for more paleontologists, Burger as well as other USU faculty, have helped create a potential certificate of paleontology. Though the certificate has not been approved, the hope is any student on any campus will be able to add it to their degree once it is launched.
“If you’re interested in paleontology, you have to make a decision, usually early on if you want to major in biology and study the animals or if you want to study geology and focus on the rocks. Oftentimes, what students will do is that they’ll take classes of each,” Burger said. “So we rolled out this certificate program so that students can then see very briefly what classes they want to take that are found in both disciplines.”
Currently, there isn’t a university in the United States that offers a paleontology degree at an undergraduate level. Burger hopes this certificate will give students an option to choose paleontology earlier on in their careers.
“I have lots of people email me or contact me and say, I want to major in paleontology, and I have to explain. There’s actually no real place in the United States that offers a pure paleontology program,” Burger said. “But this certificate will allow people to have that opportunity as undergrads and make that decision very early on.”
Joel Pederson is hopeful the certificate will be approved by spring and open for students to register in fall semester.
“I think it would launch in the next academic year. So a certificate won’t actually be on the books, you know, in a useful way until at least the summer of 2024,” Pederson said. “It’s probably going to be the beginning of fall, maybe next August.”
Classes like the Natural History of Dinosaurs will continue to be offered, and students on the Uintah Basin and Price campuses can access museums like the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, or the Prehistoric Museum housed at USU in Price. Students can also access unique internships and get involved with digs.
Most importantly, students interested in geological sciences should continue to cultivate their sense of curiosity and wonder.
“Always ask questions, and don’t lose your sense of wonder,” Danos said. “I got into geology because I thought storytelling was the most incredible skill you could have. Someone told me that stratigraphy, the layers of rock, were like the pages of Earth’s history textbook. Geology is hard, science is hard, but the best way you can get good at science is by asking questions.”