One of the joys of fossil-hunting in the remote desert of Uzbekistan, says J. David Archibald, is sitting down in the evening to watch a brilliant sunset while sipping single malt scotch, puffing on a cigar and talking with Hans-Dieter Sues.
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Hans-Dieter Sues: "This museum really has tremendous resources and tremendous potential." (Lake Fong, Post-Gazette) |
Sometimes, Sues, a dinosaur paleontologist, and Archibald, a mammal paleontologist, will discuss their shared love of old books, particularly those of Darwin. At other times, Sues entertains Archibald and his international group of colleagues with a lively discourse on science history.
"The Russians were enthralled by him," said Archibald of San Diego State University. "He's got a great sense of humor. He laughs all the time and the Russians just love that."
But Sues had to cut short his most recent central Asian sojourn so he could hurry back to Toronto, where he was vice president of collections and research at the Royal Ontario Museum, to arrange to move his family to Pittsburgh this fall.
As of this month, the 46-year-old Sues is the new associate director for science and collections at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and a curator of vertebrate paleontology.
In the science and collections post, Sues will set overall research priorities for the museum and work to preserve and expand its 21 million specimens, one of the largest collections in the world. But as a dinosaur paleontologist, he also arrives at an auspicious time, when the museum has laid plans for a $36 million expansion of venerable Dinosaur Hall.
"It's always been my ambition to develop a major dinosaur exhibit," said Sues, who this fall assumed the presidency of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the world's largest paleontology organization.
Those opportunities are few. The exhibits are so expensive -- and the task of remounting dinosaur skeletons so labor intensive -- that they often remain in place 50 years or more. The Carnegie's Dinosaur Hall, for instance, has had no major addition since the Tyrannosaurus rex was added in 1942 and otherwise is substantially unchanged since its opening in 1907.
The American Museum of Natural History is the only major museum to recently renovate its dinosaur exhibits, Sues said, so the Carnegie could leap to the forefront when the expansion is complete.
"The nice thing is that we have such wonderful raw material here -- the third largest [dinosaur] collection," Sues said. Specimen collections are what museums are all about and the strength of the collections ultimately determine the museum's value to the public.
Recent fashion has been to add interactive exhibits and splashy displays to museums, using Disney's Epcot Center as the new benchmark, but Sues said the pendulum is swinging back.
"There are only so many flashing lights you can look at," he said. "After awhile, you have to do something to refresh that, to provide real objects. No matter how many Web sites you have ... even the most wired person will be awed by the real object."
"Hans is a wonderful and amazingly talented scholar," said K. Christopher Beard, a curator of vertebrate paleontology who will become chief of the section next year when long-time curator Mary Dawson steps down. Where once the expertise of the museum's paleontologists was focused heavily on mammalian evolution since the age of dinosaurs, the addition of a true dinosaur paleontologist continues a shift in expertise to earlier eras.
"When I came here, I was the fourth Cenozoic [the era since dinosaurs became extinct] mammal paleontologist," Beard said. "Suddenly, I'm the only person doing it."
Love from the beginning
Sues said museums are his first love. He grew up in a small town outside of Dusseldorf, Germany, and the modest natural history museum there was his first connection to the natural world beyond songbirds, squirrels and the occasional rat.
He knew he wanted to be a paleontologist from the age of 4, when his parents gave him a book on prehistoric life. By the time he was ready for college, however, his father, a banker, wasn't sure that was a practical career. When Sues told his father his other interests were art history and astrophysics, the elder Sues gave his blessing to paleontology.
Sues graduated with honors from Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat in Mainz, Germany, in 1975 and went on to earn a master's degree at the University of Alberta and a master's and doctorate in biology at Harvard University. He also is a graduate of the Museum Management Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
Following post-doctoral work at McGill University and at the Smithsonian Institution, he worked as a research paleobiologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. In 1992, he became a curator at the Toronto museum and also joined the University of Toronto faculty, working his way up to the rank of professor of zoology.
Though the Carnegie Museum has recently faced budget shortfalls and layoffs, Sues said that is a problem common to most museums today and that he is optimistic about its future.
"This museum really has tremendous resources and tremendous potential," Sues said, and has a worldwide reputation as first rank.
Archibald said that, unlike himself and many field scientists, Sues has a knack for administration. "He seems to eat it up and he does well. ...He's a take-command kind of guy," Archibald said.
But he's also "a scientist's scientist," Archibald continued, and though there may be flashier, better known dinosaur hunters, Sues is well-respected within the profession. He's a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and serves on the National Geographic Society's research and exploration committee.
Sues said he will continue his field work, which has included expeditions to China, Canada and Morocco and most recently Uzbekistan. Before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and other central Asian republics were largely off-limits to Western scientists. Now, central Asia and China are the areas of greatest interest to paleontologists.
The Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan is proving to be a particularly rich source of dinosaur fossils from the Cretaceous period, many of which can be found exposed on the surface.
"You just pick up fossils, just walking along," he marveled. The remote site Archibald and Sues are investigating, which takes a two-day drive to reach, includes fossils ranging from salamanders to dinosaurs.
Notably, the fossils include tyrannosaurus, duck-billed dinosaurs and other dinosaurs that later made a sudden appearance in North America, suggesting they may have evolved first in Central Asia and then crossed into North America by way of the Bering land bridge.
Sues said another favorite hunting ground is the East Coast -- eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia, where dinosaur fossils from the earlier Triassic period are abundant.
"Truth be told, the Triassic is my favorite period," Sues said, noting the wide diversity of dinosaurs that lived then. "There was some weird stuff; it must have been an amazing time."
Paleontologists have largely forsaken the eastern United States since the 19th century, preferring to gather fossils in the West. Dense populations and dense vegetation make it a challenging place to search.
"I often find myself exploring behind the McDonald's or in road excavations," he added.
Byron Spice can be reached at bspice@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1578.
