GENEROSITY AND
O P P O R T U N I T Y AT T H E U W
Dinosaur Dreams By Jamie Swenson Photography by Dennis Wise On his 20th birthday, Zeke Augustine slung a 25-pound bag of plaster over his shoulder and trudged up a soft hillside in the triple-digit midday heat. It wasn’t how he’d expected to spend his birthday. But Augustine, ’23, wasn’t complaining. The aspiring paleontologist was in the middle of a dream come true: his first dinosaur dig. Here in the remote eastern Montana portion of the Hell Creek Formation—possibly the best place in the world to find fossils from the Late Cretaceous—he was working with a small team of experts to uncover the fossilized bones of an oviraptorosaur, a category of beaked dinosaurs closely related to birds. The team included Greg Wilson Mantilla, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and Dave DeMar, ’16, one of his former Ph.D. students and postdocs. For two days they had been carefully removing sediment from the animal’s fossilized pelvis, vertebrae and limbs, wrapping them in plaster for transport back to the Burke. The exact identity of this dinosaur was unknown, and the mystery and excitement more than made up for the oppressive heat. Was this a “chicken from hell,” paleontologists’ nickname for the rare Anzu wyliei, which once could be up to 11 feet long and weigh 650 pounds? Or might it even be a new species? It was too soon to tell. Suddenly, DeMar’s voice echoed from the other side of the hill: “Zeke! We found a claw!” Time stopped for Augustine. The self-identified “bonehead” had been fantasizing all his life about a moment like this, and here it was. But long before he ever got to dig up a dinosaur, he had to become one.
ZEKE THE T. REX
Obsessed with dinosaurs since childhood, Augustine joined the Burke-affiliated Northwest Paleontological Association at age 15. Soon, he’d landed a series of volunteer positions with the Burke—including dressing up in his own T. rex costume to greet patrons and sell memberships. In addition to the philanthropic support that helps fund everything from field-research trips to community education 44
UW MAGAZINE
Zeke Augustine, ’23, has sifted through soil for microscopic fossils and helped dig up a Triceratops. The Burke Museum has been at the heart of it all.
