Meet a Paleontologist: Gavin Bradley

Many paleontologists have an origin story—a moment that pulled them into the exciting world of prehistoric animals and ancient life. A shriek of horror when the Dilophosaurus devoured an unsuspecting computer programmer in Jurassic Park. An evening spent reading about the adventures of Arthur and Will Denison in Dinotopia. A school field trip to a museum where the hulking skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex left them open-mouthed.

For paleontologist Gavin Bradley, it was issue 14 of Dinosaurs! magazine. It had a Coelophysis (Gavin’s favourite dinosaur) running on the front cover, trying to catch its own child because at the time, Coelophysis was believed to be a cannibal.

“I remember being like five or six years old and thinking, am I allowed to look at this?! It was really grizzly and cool, and you know, you're really blood thirsty when you're a kid,” he laughs.

The theory of Coelophysis as a cannibal has since been disproven. In fact, it was one of the first things Gavin learnt in graduate school at the University of Alberta.

Now a lecturer at the university, he teaches introductory paleontology classes and runs the Faculty of Science massive open online courses (MOOCs).

“I like being one of the first instructors that students encounter in their degree,” he says. “I like being there for those moments of awe and wonder.”

Tell us about your journey towards becoming a professor.

I grew up in Belfast and in Ireland as a whole, there aren't a lot of dinosaur bones. I think we only have two that have ever been found on the whole island. I got dinosaur knowledge wherever I could and when you're a kid thinking about a career as a paleontologist, you’re thinking about wandering through deserts, brushing off a tiny bit of sand and automatically finding an entire dinosaur skeleton.

In grad school, the first thing that I ever found during fieldwork was a tyrannosaur tooth. My research was going to be on tyrannosaur teeth so when I spotted it I was like, “it's a sign, I'm going to be a great paleontologist!” I dug it out of the ground, held it in my hands and about two seconds later, it exploded into tiny pieces.

But even as I got better at field work and stopped picking up rocks and bringing them to my supervisor, what I really enjoyed was teaching and outreach. There's just something about that moment when you see the sparks go off in a student's eyes. I fell in love with teaching people about paleontology and trying to inspire their own moments of awe like when I saw that magazine cover as a kid.

One really cool way that I've been able to do that in my career is through MOOCs. They’re free courses we create at the university and anyone around the world can take them. The first one that I worked on was Dino 101 and my mom actually took it from Ireland and printed out her certificate and put it on our fridge.

You also write poems and recently published your first collection, Separation Anxiety. How did you get into poetry?

As a teenager, I actually thought for a brief period that I was going to be a professional soccer player—as everybody does. Then I got a really bad injury and thought “I better find something else to be interested in just in case paleontology doesn't work out on the island of Ireland that has no dinosaurs!”

I was really into post-punk bands at the time, like The Libertines and Babyshambles, and they were kind of making poetry cool again. I'm not sure if it's cool now, but they definitely made it seem cool. So, I started writing poetry that emulated them a little.

Then I moved from Ireland to Canada and you know, immigration can be very lonely, and grad school is a lot of very long hours sitting at your desk. I found poetry and writing to be really comforting. I also didn't expect to have to change the way I spoke as much as I did, but not a lot of people understood what I was saying when I came over to North America. In poetry, I didn't have to worry about that, I could use slang from back home. So, it was a good thing to pick up and take with me to a completely new place.

What does the relationship between art and science look like to you?

Art and science are often billed as polar opposites but I think it's a bit of an artificial boundary that people put up between them. I think they go hand in hand. I think there's a commonality between them and they’re just two different ways of trying to understand and connect to the world around us.

If you think about how most people get introduced to paleontology, it's through art. Maybe they saw Jurassic Park or The Land Before Time growing up. Or maybe like myself they saw a magazine with a really cool illustration on the cover. Art populates people's imaginations and helps bridge the gap between these bones that we find in the ground and the actual animals that once roamed the earth.

Even with writing as well—I think in this day and age, it's not enough to just be a really good scientist or a really good researcher. You have to be able to communicate your findings to the general public. In my mind, that’s the last part of the scientific process. Being able to write effectively has helped me do that in my career.

If people could take away just one important point about paleontology, what would you want that to be?

I think the thing I’d like people to take away from paleontology is the knowledge that our past as a planet can help us understand what's going on today in our environments and our ecosystems. I also think it creates a respect for the natural world that's very important to have right now, especially with all of the climatic changes that we’re experiencing. I think it's a reminder that this world didn't always belong to humans and we have a responsibility to care for it.

Wanna learn more about dinosaurs?

Visit our feature exhibition, T. rex: The Ultimate Predator presented by RBC and White Spot Restaurants. It'll take you back in time to encounter the prehistoric wonders of the late Cretaceous period and come face-to-face with a 66-million-year-old marvel!