Fossils are helping these students find new passions

Destiny Torres

The Orange County

ORANGE, Calif. -- When Chapman University screen acting student Ben Rotenberg learned his friends were heading to Montana to film a documentary about the students who helped excavate a set of 78-millionyear-old dinosaur bones, he begged them to let him come along.

About a year later, not only is Rotenberg, a senior, helping to uncover those pelvic bones, but he also uncovered a passion for working with fossils.

Each summer, Jack Horner, paleontologist and presidential fellow at Chapman University, in Orange, California, takes students to a ranch in Montana for hands-on experience digging up dinosaur bones.

The bones discovered by Chapman student Sarah Wallace last year were carefully excavated – along with the big chunk of dirt surrounding them – and wrapped in protective plaster to be brought back to the university for students to continue carefully digging free from the rock.

“I was brought to Chapman to work with students and try to get them to consider other ways to think,” said Horner, who has been a technical advisor on the “Jurassic Park” movies and was an inspiration behind the character Dr. Alan Grant depicted in the movies and the 1990 book. “Paleontology not being something that we have here at Chapman, offers the students experiences with the geological past that they wouldn’t normally get here.”

Once removed from the rock,