Ancient Inspirations: Where Creativity Meets Paleontology
Join Kassi Kincaid engages in a compelling conversation with Dr. Ron Tykoski, Vice President of Science and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the esteemed Perot Museum in Dallas. Dr. Tykoski delves into his transformative journey into paleontology , and explores the essence of creativity in the profession.
Transcript:
Kassi Kincaid (00:00):
Well, hello everyone and welcome to The Edge of Creativity podcast. I'm your host, Kassi Kincaid, and join with me today is Dr. Ron Tykoski, Vice President of Science and Curator of Vertebrae Paleontology. Dr. Ron, thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (00:19):
Thanks for asking me to come on the show.
Kassi Kincaid (00:21):
I am so excited to have you with us today. It was such a joy filming with you several years ago at the Perot Museum in Dallas, one of the most esteemed museums around, and I just had such a great time with you. I thought our listeners just had to meet you themselves and to learn about paleontology in a different light today focused on creativity.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (00:47):
Well, I am glad to be here. Anything I can do to relay that to the audience, tell'em what we do, creativity, creativity wise as a paleontologist, I'm glad to help out with.
Kassi Kincaid (00:58):
I feel like paleontology is one of those just almost idolized careers as kids, boys and girls. They love dinosaurs, dinosaur books, dinosaur bones. I mean, I was honestly a little starstruck when I met you two years ago. I had never met a real life paleontologist coming from the world of early childhood education. That was something that I can cross off my bucket list. So what is it about the world of paleontology that has just intrigued you for a career?
Dr. Ron Tykoski (01:31):
Well, I was one of those kids that got totally enthralled with paleontology from the earliest age as far as I can remember, as far back as I can remember. I've always wanted to be paleontologist. I was one of those little kids who loved dinosaurs, got into it in all ways and shapes possible. The imagination ran wild. One of my very, I like to tell people my very first dig was in, I was about three to four years old and decided I was going to go find a dinosaur in my backyard, and it's remarkable how large of a hole a 3-year-old can dig with a shovel when they're unsupervised for a half hour or so or whatever. I want to making a big hole in the backyard and got in a little trouble I think on that one. But yeah, I've always wanted to do this and I'm just one of those really fortunate people who things aligned, right, started sort of aligned and allowed me to continue on this path all the way into adulthood and successfully do that paleontology thing.
Kassi Kincaid (02:40):
So it wasn't just a phase for you. I know as kids, we just love dinosaurs and there's just kind of a phase to where we're like, oh, we can't just dig up dinosaur bones 24/7. What was it that clicked for you that it wasn't just a passing phase?
Dr. Ron Tykoski (02:56):
Again, that's really different for every person, but for me, I don't know why I stuck with it per se. There was probably a time say in middle school, high school, where I thought about going in different directions, whatever. I have a lot of different interests and history, natural science and things like that beyond failing talented. So, but one of the things that was important for me was having extremely supportive parents who we did not come from great means. And so it was actually, it was a thing for us to do in the summer. It would be to go to the nearest Natural History Museum, which was free.
(03:41):
And so once a summer my folks would take us about 30 miles north of where we live to the Natural History Museum on the campus of the University of Michigan in Arbor, Michigan. And I can remember being about five years old, standing in a balcony, looking out across from a balcony on the third floor, looking out onto the paleontology hall with an Allasarus skeleton and a Mastodon and a bunch of these things, all these exhibits and everything and this amazing place. And my parents sitting there next time me going, you work really hard in school. Maybe someday you can come work here at this museum. Okay, fine. That's easy enough. And so you make a point of doing that and you take it to heart. It literally drills itself into a little kid's head like that. Like, oh, is that all it takes? Okay, no problem.
(04:29):
And so I like to point out that 13 years later as a freshman undergraduate at that same university, I was the first person in line at the work study job fair table lining up to sign up to be a docent, a museum docent at that very same museum. And so from that moment on, I was hired on and worked for the next five years in that very museum. And my folks said, well, if you work hard enough, maybe somebody, you can come work here, son. I did. So it's like you always watch out what you tell a little kid, they can do whatever. But no, they also instilled in me this idea that you can do anything you want. So I really do believe that, and I've instilled that in my kids as well. You can be as big as you want, as long as you work hard.
Kassi Kincaid (05:13):
Can you tell us how you ended up at the Perot Museum? Because I mean around here, the Perot Museum is a very big deal, I'm sure, in the country. How did you go from the student and then land to such a prestigious role at the Perot?
Dr. Ron Tykoski (05:31):
Well, after wrapping up a degree in geology at Michigan, then I really quickly got married a month later and applied to graduate school at a place that had the same sorts of things I had got interested in that turned out to be University Texas at Austin. So my brand new wife and I, we moved all the way across the country to Austin, Texas, and I embarked on a graduate degree program. So while there, I had wonderful opportunities to learn an incredible amount from wonderful faculty members that had access to the largest paleontology collection in the entire state of Texas, which it's never a bad thing to have at your fingertips. And also worked, I had started as another job at Michigan. I learned how to do fossil preparation. That means that's the process of taking a fossil, that wall on the rock or whatever, and cleaning it up, putting it together, reassembling it, getting it in the condition that it can be either studied or exhibited or both a lot of times can't do much with 'em when they first come out of the ground.
(06:38):
So I learned from one of the best fossil preparators in the world there at Michigan. Learned those techniques. Spent four years working in his lab and I brought those with me down to Austin. So not only study, but I was also able to work on my own fossils, which actually helped the process quite a bit. And as those degrees were wrapping up, I was finishing up my PhD and finally it's like, wow, I'm going to have to graduate, do something with this. Wow, that's terrifying. So the opportunity came up, just happened an opening, came up for a fossil preparer at what was then the Dallas Museum of Natural History, just 200 miles up the road from Austin.
(07:14):
When I graduated. I applied for that. The curator at the time took a look at my resume, came on down, used it as an excuse to come visit the collections in Austin. I'm going to come visit the collection and I'll interview this guy. And so he killed two birds with one stone and there it worked out. They hired me on and wrapped up PhD. And two weeks later I was in Dallas and started embarking on that journey. So I started here at the museum as the fossil preparator. And over the course, that was in 2005. So now over 18 plus years, I've stuck around long enough here. They keep promoting me into other positions. So there you go. I'm director of the lab with curator, and now I'm the Vice President of Scientific, which that means I oversee not just the paleontology, but also the collections and our general minerals and other aspects.
Kassi Kincaid (08:05):
Wow, that's incredible. I love how people's stories, like how they got started because it just sheds so much light on who they are and honestly how they become creative and use their creative skills throughout their life and mold those as well. So how would you say that you use creativity in your role as both vice president and as curator? Because those are two different things.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (08:34):
So on sort of the vice president side, the vice president of science thing, I interact a lot with our exhibits team, our learning team, so our educators and things like that, trying to come up with content. You've seen the exhibits in the building. I wasn't the vice president of science back then. I was still fossil preparator then, but I was one of paleontologists we had on staff with that. So many of the things that you see on exhibit in that building, I had a hand in developing the content, helping select stuff, helping advising the exhibit companies that we hired to build and mount these things like this is the way they should look and this is what they should say. Having that vision of, you know what this should look like, this what this animal would look like. If you use your imagination, close your eyes and look like that and try to relay that.
(09:21):
The creativity required to describe something to somebody else in a way that they can see somebody who's not an expert in the field, but they can understand and go, oh, I can now see what you're saying. There's not just hands-on creativity. There's creativity with spoken word. There's creativity and relaying ideas of taking complex ideas and simple. That's true talent. There's taking something that's complex, explaining it to a five-year-old, having them go, oh yeah, I get that. Yeah, of course if you can do that, you really succeeded with your ability to creatively describe. And so there's parts of that. But even today, being able to advise and the direction exhibit should go or the content, something we should be going towards this or that, or now even overall research program, we've shifted our program here out of necessity to be a bit more focused on our regional story.
(10:24):
And so how do we now cater that message? How do we get people excited here? So a slightly different angle teaching about the history of our planet, the world around us, the direction our planet might be going, the world, the biological world. How do you relay that? How do you get people to understand, you get excited about it, not just the public, but also my coworkers. How do I explain to an exhibits team? How do I explain to a designer, how do I create an image? How do I sketch something out for them so that they can understand and go, that's great, or they look at it and go, that's better. You don't always take it a home run. You get a swing and a message. And so those sorts of things like that sort of on that skill, like creativity of knowing how to speak to people in a respectful way that gets them excited and gets them on your team.
Kassi Kincaid (11:21):
I love that. And talking with all kinds of different people with all kinds of different backgrounds about creativity. This might be the first time that it's come up about creativity, how to get something across to somebody else. We think about creativity as all these other things of maybe problem solving or in the arts or things like that. But there is so much creativity in, like you said, how do I get all these scientific things out to the common person that knows nothing about dinosaurs or in leadership, how to get certain ideas across. I love that.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (11:55):
There are people who make something complex. They're the people who are able to take those complex things, make them understandable, in the least number of words. And so if you have that scope, because I know plenty of extremely smart people, way smarter than I am, they know the ins and outs of things. I just look at it and go, I'm drooling pool compared to this individual. But boy, they can't explain something very well because they're too dang smart for their own good basically, and having incredible knowledge is wonderful, but it's limiting. Pass that on and relay it to somebody else, a format they can understand. And so as somebody who works in a museum profession, I'm constantly forced to make sure everyone can understand. So there is a level, there is also a hands-on creativity that you described and be able to wrap your minds around making copies of three dimensional objects like that.
(12:54):
That is an incredible skill as well. And so that's where paleontology will bring in that ability, that hands-on artistic skillset, the best fossil prepared, who will ever find that? People who are wonderfully skilled technicians, artists, artistic, and then paleo art. I mean, come on. I don't care if you're an adult. You're a little kid. You look at some really cool pictures of painting of dinosaurs in the environment and they look lifelike and stuff like that. Come on, everybody likes that. We're going to say oh Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises are just think about the creativity it took for the programmers and the artists who had to create those digital objects, those animals, and make 'em believable. So many different facets to it.
Kassi Kincaid (13:42):
There are so many different facets, and I love how you encapsulate everything, the communication to your team, to people that come to the museum, and also the hands-on skills, how to put the bones together. I remember you saying puzzles were a good thing as kids, even when we recorded with you last. And what a great skill that is to be able to see things and think creatively how they all go together. How would you say that all your creativity there at the museum has an impact? And I'm sure you can go a lot of different ways with this internally, externally.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (14:24):
Hoping that kids walk in the door, get down to the floor, they immediately go, "Wow!" And they see something and they go, I want to do that. I want to learn more about that. Oh my gosh, I never know you. I also want adults to walk in the door and go, "Whoa, I've never seen that before! What is that? Quick? Let's read that. What is it? Oh man, I never thought..." I want it to happen to everybody of all. And so I want that inspiration, that moment of realizing that, wow, the world is bigger than I thought. There's broader horizons out here and I can learn things about it, and I want to go out in and learn more. I want to become more, I want to experience more.
(15:05):
That's how I hope. The creativity that bring to a museum setting bring to paleontology. I mean, okay, it's cool that I can describe the shape of the articulations and the stuff of a knuckle bone, of a foot of a plant. That's great. How is that going to get people fired up? This is where you take that technical knowledge and you apply it in a way and translate it to where people can understand both the general public and also my professional colleagues where I can say, this is a unique and different bit of anatomy that we now look at, look for. We need to understand how this goes and have them go, oh, wow, I should look at that. Just like people walk in and see, oh, wow, I never thought about that little bit of anatomy. Oh, well, now we've got to go look at some more, so many different levels of impact, and doing so hopefully makes the world a better place for somebody.
Kassi Kincaid (16:05):
Absolutely. If there was one parting comment or word of advice for our listeners, what would it be?
Dr. Ron Tykoski (16:13):
Don't be afraid to learn. Go out and explore. See the world around you. Go to nature. Take the facts in your own hands. Look and see for yourself.
Kassi Kincaid (16:22):
I love it. So simple. Yeah.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (16:24):
I have to attribute that correctly. That is not a quote of mine that has actually etched onto the facade on the front of the University of Michigan. Go to nature. Take the facts in your own hands, look and see for yourself.
Kassi Kincaid (16:38):
Wow. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Ron. This has been such a joy to talk with you about creativity and impact today. Thank you for all the amazing work that you're doing at the Perot Museum.
Dr. Ron Tykoski (16:52):
Well, thank you for asking, and again, I hope everybody gets inspired, not just in paleontology, but in all sorts of other things, and thank you for doing this.
Kassi Kincaid (17:00):
Thanks so much for joining us for this episode on The Edge of Creativity podcast. Be sure to follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming conversations. We'll see you next time.
